Plants and Pipettes

It’s autumn! We just came back from a trip to Berlin’s botanical garden and record for the first time ever remotely – so forgive us for any technical hiccups. This week, we got a bit lost in a long discussion about the usefulness of committees as safeguards concerning ethical questions and we promise that we’re usually not that angry.

Tegan’s paper: Dong, Y., Chen, S., Cheng, S., Zhou, W., Ma, Q., Chen, Z., … Xiang, Q.-Y. (2019). Natural selection and repeated patterns of molecular evolution following allopatric divergence. ELife, 8.

Joram’s favourite plant is the water hyacinth.

Tegan presents the work and life of Mary Somerville.

The follow-up to this PNAS paper and this research on gay genes triggered a long conversation about ethics, committees and systemic issues. These are the tweets we talk about: Eugenics based on gay gene research; Problematic images for PNAS paper on twitter

Story on sexist background of physicist Feynman from Caltech letters

The beauty of autumn, the second spring.

This weird celery is the new trendy vegetable.

Eek eek eek pic.twitter.com/EuM74UfVYX

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

We talk quite a bit about airports in the beginning but actually this episode is about CRISPR (yay!), favourite plants (yaaaaaayyy!) and fun stuff (yyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy!). It’s a good episode.

Joram’s paper: Decaestecker, W., Andrade Buono, R., Pfeiffer, M., Vangheluwe, N., Jourquin, J., Karimi, M., … Jacobs, T. B. (2019). CRISPR-TSKO: A Technique for Efficient Mutagenesis in Specific Cell Types, Tissues, or Organs in Arabidopsis. The Plant Cell, tpc.00454.2019.

Tegan’s favourite plant is Gloeomargarita lithophora.

Joram presents the work and life of Enid MacRobbie who pioneered the use of radio tracers to measure fluxes across membranes.

Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity (The Atlantic)

If The Zombie Apocalypse Happens, This Is Where Scientists Say You Should Go (iflscience)

Plants don’t have feelings and aren’t conscious, a biologist argues (ScienceNews)

Was Heidi the Octopus Really Dreaming? (NY times)

These mysterious vessels are among the world’s oldest baby bottles (ScienceMag)

Plant cells-based biological matrix composites (BioArxiv)

An experimental test of the ovulatory homolog model of female orgasm (PNAS)

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Tegan was wearing beautiful earrings. Unfortunately for you, they happen to make a nice little clinking sound that you might or might not pick up from the recording. Also I had terrible discipline in touching noisy wrapping paper. We’re terribly sorry, but the episode is worth it, I promise.

Tegan’s paper: Fang, J., Zhang, F., Wang, H., Wang, W., Zhao, F., Li, Z., … Chu, C. (2019). Ef-cd locus shortens rice maturity duration without yield penalty. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(37), 18717–18722.

Help me win the community award for the Fast Forward Science Contest by liking the video on youtube and leaving a comment. Thank you!

Joram’s favourite plant is bay tree or Laurus nobilis.

Tegan presents the life and work of Janaki Ammal. Here are two more articles on her: Smithsonian, The Better India

Fun Stuff:

What the F*ck, Australia.

Ellen Airhart just started a great new podcast on Plant Crimes. Find her Instagram here and here.

UK roadsides on verge of becoming wildlife corridors, say experts (guardian)

‘Sneezing’ plants may spread pathogens to their neighbors (Science News)

Justin Bieber has cats.

Have you read our cool article on mitochondria?

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Oh no, GMO! Did you know that your GMO-free peanuts are far from being free from transgenes? Also they’re full of chemicals, most of which are taken up by the body and used in the human metabolism. Beware the mighty peanut!

Joram’s paper: Matveeva, T.V. & Otten, Widespread occurrence of natural genetic transformation of plants by Agrobacterium, L. Plant Mol Biol (2019).

Tegan’s favourite plant is Lagarostrobos franklinii.

Joram presents the work of Wangari Muta Maathai. She was a biologist, political activist and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Eat your heart out: native water rats have worked out how to safely eat cane toads (The Conversation)

Scientists say sustainable forestry organizations should lift ban on biotech trees (Sciencemag)

To Teach Kids that Know More of Pokemon than Phytoplankton, David Ng Made a Game of It (The Tyee)

Plants can tell time even without a brain – here’s how (The Conversation)

Avocado genome is now here

Spider silk is created by adding spider DNA to microbes (aalto.fi)

Quiz: how green is your lab? (nature)

Decolonizing field ecology

The alternative reality of plant mitochondrial DNA: One ring does not rule them all (PLOS)

There’s a good reason we’re moderating climate change deniers: uninformed comments undermine expertise (The Conversation)

Attachment bonds between domestic cats and humans (Cell.com)

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Animal monogamy is overrated, especially in swans. Swans have worms are always angry. Don’t be a swan. Be an Arabidopsis. (we were both sleep deprived by the time we recorded this episode, so i guess you do the same to adjust to our mindset)

Tegan’s paper: Yi, P. and Goshima, G. (2019), Transient cotransformation of CRISPR/Cas9 and oligonucleotide templates enables efficient editing of target loci in Physcomitrella patens. Plant Biotechnol J. doi:10.1111/pbi.13238

Joram’s favourite plant is Coleochaete scutata. Here is a cool video with the spinning plastids done by Henrik Buschmann (his twitter is here).

Tegan talks about Lynn Margulis who strongly supported the endosymbiontic theory of chloroplast evolution.

Plants are going extinct up to 350 times faster than the historical norm (The Conversation)

Why are peppercorn trees always planted at schools? (ABC.au)

Use chalk to label plants (like this or this)

Scientists quash idea of single ‘gay gene’ (guardian)

Crows like cheeseburgers and get high cholesterol. Tegan doesn’t like crows.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

We are not only achievers in science, we are officially high achievers in science. Don’t believe us? Ask Stefanie, she’ll tell you. This week we bring you research on agrivoltaics, facts about tulips and two tired podcasters. Please enjoy.

Joram’s paper: Barron-Gafford, G. A., Pavao-Zuckerman, M. A., Minor, R. L., Sutter, L. F., Barnett-Moreno, I., Blackett, D. T., … Macknick, J. E. (2019). Agrivoltaics provide mutual benefits across the food–energy–water nexus in drylands. Nature Sustainability.

Here is the twitter thread explaining the findings by the first author.

We have been invited to talk to Stefanie from the Career Conversations podcast and in turn we invited Stefanie to present her favourite plant on the podcast. Her favourite plant is the tulip.

If you are interested in why and how we do what we do at plants and pipettes, check out Stefanie’s podcast episode with us here. You can also find it on iTunes or your favourite podcast app under the name “Career Conversations”

Joram presents the work of Margaret Clay Ferguson (1863 – 1951) who amongst other work researched non-Mendelian inheritance of flower colour.

We need to stop colonising countries for science. Read more about the issue here: DECOLONIZING ECOLOGY FOR SOCIALLY JUST SCIENCE (Science Connected Magazine). While you’re at it, read up on the Nagoya protocol and urge your local politicians to ratify and act on it (We’re looking at you, USA).

The Great Green Wall of Africa is a cool project fighting the desertification of subsaharan countries. Here is the project website and this is a good article on the project: The “Great Green Wall” Didn’t Stop Desertification, but it Evolved Into Something That Might (Smithsonian)

Japanese researchers created a rain-resistant wheat using CRISPR/Cas9.

Garlic 2.0 is a cloned cat. Why, though.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

We had a picnic (not during the podcast, but just before the podcast) and it was really nice. Consider having a picnic yourself, and while your picnicing, listen to this episode on repeat over your car stereo (leave the doors open for enhanced sound). This is how all Berliners spend their summer.

Tegan’s paper: Zhao, E. M., Suek, N., Wilson, M. Z., Dine, E., Pannucci, N. L., Gitai, Z., … Toettcher, J. E. (2019). Light-based control of metabolic flux through assembly of synthetic organelles. Nature Chemical Biology, 15(6), 589–597.

Joram’s favourite plant is Aristolochia arborea because it mimics mushrooms with its flowers to attract gnats and abuse them as pollinators without sharing nectar.

Tegan presents Mary Emilie Holmes who was the first woman to be elected a fellow in the Geological Society of America.

Study on extreme self-citation: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database (nature.com)

Cool flying seed: A seed flying like a bullet: ballistic seed dispersal in Chinese witch-hazel (Hamamelis mollis OLIV., Hamamelidaceae) (Royal Society of Publishing) and the video we’re talking about: Watch this plant fire seeds with bulletlike force (sciencemag.org)

Mexican shrimp plant is false hops in German (Justicia brandegeeana).

Nicole Kidman likes to take their cats in backpacks.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

We’re busy with applying for jobs and still we’re making more episodes for you. Aren’t we nice? We’re really nice. Plants are also nice and so is plant research. We talk about plant research so this podcast is also nice.

Check out the career conversation podcast! It’s good!

Joram’s paper: Belbin, F. E., Hall, G. J., Jackson, A. B., Schanschieff, F. E., Archibald, G., Formstone, C., & Dodd, A. N. (2019). Plant circadian rhythms regulate the effectiveness of a glyphosate-based herbicide. Nature Communications, 10(1), 3704.

Tegan’s favourite plant are two plants and they are sea grasses named Cymodocea nodosa and Poseidona oceanica.

Check out this video on the downsides of the gig economy (deliveroo, fiverr, etc.) [re:publica 2014 – Florian Alexander Schmidt: Crowdsourcing Design: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly]

This week’s representative of diversity in plant science is Johanna Döbereiner. She contributed important work to the study of nitrogen fixing bacteria and worked for over 50 years in plant science in Brazil.

Progress in project DEAL: More than 700 German research institutions strike open-access deal with Springer Nature (sciencemag.org)

The amazon rainforest is on fire (way more than in previous years): Amazon fires: what is happening and is there anything we can do? (guardian.com)

F. oxysporum TR4 made its way to the South American continent and threatens banana production. We wrote this article about it.

Chile made a big step forward to fight sexual harassment: Bill to fight sexual harassment in universities approved by Chilean Senate (sciencemag.org)

Finally, ancient plants can reproduce in the UK (because of the climate crisis): Global heating: ancient plants set to reproduce in UK after 60m years (guardian.com)

‘Crazy cat ladies’ do not exist, scientists say (The Independent)

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

What? Another episode? I thought we were done with episodes. Okay okay, here we go again. Plant science. We love it. You love us. You must love plant science.

Tegan’s paper: He, J., Ye, W., Choi, D. S., Wu, B., Zhai, Y., Guo, B., … Ma, J. (2019). Structural analysis of Phytophthora suppressor of RNA silencing 2 (PSR2) reveals a conserved modular fold contributing to virulence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(16), 8054–8059.

Little edit note: Phytophthora is not actually a regular fungus, it is an oomycete, which is a fungus-like eukaryote.

Joram’s favourite plant are mangroves.

Starting this week we want to recognise diversity in plant science. The first person we want draw your attention to is Barbara McClintock.

We hit Earth overshoot day in late July. Yayyyyyyyy! Well done, everyone!

Excel is responsible for 20% of typos in scientific data. Don’t use Excel unless you absolutely have to.

Cat sharks do fluorescence on their skin.

Cool tool to convert protein IDs into nice graphics is named Illustrate.

Kary Mullis died earlier this year. He was the inventor of PCR, a crucial tool for modern molecular biology. His personal views were quite controversial.

Why do cats eat grass? To get rid of intestinal parasites.

The rise and decline of bubble tea in Germany as told by the German podcast Rice and Shine.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

If you are a plant you are probably indifferent to podcasts. So I’ll just assume you’re a human with ears who also likes podcasts. Boy, are you in for a treat because this here is a new episode of a podcast. What a coincidence! We talk about plant research and non-plant research. Excited? We are too!

Joram’s paper: Zhang, W., Corwin, J. A., Copeland, D. H., Feusieran’s, J., Eshbaugh, R., Cook, D. E., … Kliebenstein, D. J. (2019). Plant–necrotroph co-transcriptome networks illuminate a metabolic battlefield. ELife, 8.

Tegan’s favourite plant is Rhizanphella as featured in this article by Chris J. Thorogood et al.

The 180 million DNA barcode project

Bioplastics are not that much better than regular plastic (probably). Go and listen to the Plastisphere podcast, it is really good, especially the episode about bioplastics. Also this story covers a newly developed edible cover for food to extend shelf life.

This tweet triggered a discussion between us about overselling science stories. What do you think? Are researchers overselling their research to inflate the importance of their work or is it PR who takes it out of context?

Finally, no more cat killing for research.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!