Plants and Pipettes

Hello and welcome to another podcast episode. We talk about antagonistic patronuseses, thoroughly researched favourite plants and so many fun facts. Like so many, I can’t even count them.

Tegan’s paper: Cromer, L., Jolivet, S., Singh, D. K., Berthier, F., De Winne, N., De Jaeger, G., … Mercier, R. (2019). Patronus is the elusive plant securin, preventing chromosome separation by antagonizing separase. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201906237.

Joram’s favourite plant is the bird of paradise plant.

Climate change news: Fungi adapt due to higher temperatures to infect more people. Fun!

engineered plants might help with the laundry.

Joram’s rant: Legislators figure out that their legislation on CRISPR in Europe is impossible to enforce because genome edited plants look like conventionally bred plants.

Two penguins escape their boxes to have some sushi. Twice.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

For the first half, Tegan is pretty much eating ice cream and Joram is talking about plant science to himself – and to you people out there. So be kind and support Joram in his struggle and listen to his tales. You might also have ice cream to go with it.

Joram’s paper: Sun, Y., Wollman, A. J. M., Huang, F., Leake, M. C., & Liu, L.-N. (2019). Single-Organelle Quantification Reveals Stoichiometric and Structural Variability of Carboxysomes Dependent on the Environment. The Plant Cell, 31(7), 1648 LP – 1664.

Tegan’s favourite plant is the hog peanut.

Support biodiversity hotspots over at conservation.org.

Amazing story about biosphere 2 as heard on the nice try! podcast.

Make sure to cook your beans properly!

Off-target effects in CRISPR analysed by a meta study – turns out there aren’t many.

Goats can understand… Taylor Swift Goat Version.

Crops in tight spots – a cool book about gardening on balconies and so on.

The untold story of antimicrobial peptides engineered into trees.

Well done, Hatty.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

What is more fun than talking about molecular research? I hope you’re shouting now “diving deep into the horrors of the climate crisis!” because you’re right. In this fun and upbeat episode we wonder whether we can stop the climate crisis by planting trees. Can you guess the answer?

Tegan’s paper: Bastin, J.-F., Finegold, Y., Garcia, C., Mollicone, D., Rezende, M., Routh, D., … Crowther, T. W. (2019). The global tree restoration potential. Science, 365(6448), 76–79.

It’s the end of the world as they know (the distinct burden of being a climate scientist)

The guardian on changing its language when talking about climate change

Paper on how small scale actions result in loss of support for large scale policy changes: Hagmann, D., Ho, E. H., & Loewenstein, G. (2019). Nudging out support for a carbon tax. Nature Climate Change, 9(6), 484–489.

Anti-climate change study on arxiv (fake study)

Responses and corrections to the bogus article 1, 2, 3

Joram’s favourite plant: Hydnora africana, a parasitic underground plant that emerges from the ground like a sandworm when flowering.
Taken from the book “Weird plants” by Chris Thorogood.

Video by kurzgesagt – in a nutshell on “is organic food better?”

PUBLISH YOUR WORK OPEN ACCESS WITH OPEN ACCESS REFERENCES OR WE WON’T TELL YOUR STORY (the story we didn’t tell)

Read Tegan’s open access paper: Armarego-Marriott, T., Kowalewska, Ł., Burgos, A., Fischer, A., Thiele, W., Erban, A., … Bock, R. (2019). Highly Resolved Systems Biology to Dissect the Etioplast-to-Chloroplast Transition in Tobacco Leaves. Plant Physiology, 180(1), 654 LP – 681.

Patent on resolving the terrible cat litter aversion syndrome

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

How not to get murdered? Will plants save you? No. If you ever get murdered, Tegan has some no legally binding advice for you. Apart from life-saving murder prevention tips we have a new paper on wheat research for you and also a favourite plant.

Joram’s paper: Voss-Fels, K. P., Stahl, A., Wittkop, B., Lichthardt, C., Nagler, S., Rose, T., … Snowdon, R. J. (2019). Breeding improves wheat productivity under contrasting agrochemical input levels. Nature Plants, 5(7), 706–714.

Tegan’s favourite plant: Enigmatic new bush tomato

Non-true cat fact: Cat caught mouse after seeing it on CCTV

Ducks and rice go well together and a Japanese robot duck

1000 plant initiative (which is not Tegan’s flat (which has more than 1k plants))

Wiggle wiggle wiggle: vibration based phenotyping

New regulations are aiming to end gender stereotyping in adverts

Cat filter derails press conference

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Joram took an electric scooter through the best city in the world to join Tegan in her kitchen for yet another episode about plants and pipettes and things that are fun.

Tegan’s paper: Weits, D. A., Kunkowska, A. B., Kamps, N. C. W., Portz, K. M. S., Packbier, N. K., Nemec Venza, Z., … Licausi, F. (2019). An apical hypoxic niche sets the pace of shoot meristem activity. Nature, 569(7758), 714–717.

The root article we published last week (or the week before if you’re listening to this one week later (don’t listen to this later than that or this statement will be inaccurate)).

Joram’s favourite plant: Stylidium graminifolium or trigger grass plant

Stylidium graminifolium , a slow motion video to show why this genus are known as trigger plants. Check out the column containing the male & female parts of the flower moving into shot very fast once triggered! Just imagine how surprised the insect must feel! @CUBotanicGarden pic.twitter.com/IYh2uO81Ok

The pollination strategy of the genus #Stylidium has to be one of the best (and fastest) examples of #plant movement. Solitary #bees/ #beeflies get punched on the back (or underneath) by the quick moving floral column. This is S. graminifolum at our #allotment #PlantsAreCool pic.twitter.com/9nilfy1hVS

Welcome to the age of collective narcissism

Go and support your LGBTSTEM friends today on July 5th! And remember to support any other QUILTBAG friends as well!

The age of protein in paleontology

Don’t watch prometheus, it has stupid DNA vision.

Fun cat fact: cats kill 1.1 billion mammals every year in Australia

Our blog post on 1080, a poison to kill off invasive species

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Friday, Friday we get down on Friday, Saturday is the next day and Sunday comes afterwards! Oh, and a new podcast episode. This time, we were a little bit rambly but we managed to cover everything important. And the windows was also open because we had like four million degrees inside, scientifically speaking.

Joram’s paper: Mehta, D., Stürchler, A., Anjanappa, R. B., Zaidi, S. S.-A., Hirsch-Hoffmann, M., Gruissem, W., & Vanderschuren, H. (2019). Linking CRISPR-Cas9 interference in cassava to the evolution of editing-resistant geminiviruses. Genome Biology, 20(1), 80.

Articles on CRISPR on plants and pipettes

Tegan’s favourite plant: Phoenix dactylifera, just a fancy word for dates.

Family tree of citrus

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Despite a MASSIVE thunderstorm we came together and recorded episode 10 for you guys. Aren’t we great? Yes, we are.

Tegan’s paper: Engineered PPR proteins as inducible switches to activate the expression of chloroplast transgenes, Margarita Rojas, Qiguo Yu, Rosalind Williams-Carrier, Pal Maliga & Alice Barkan, Nature Plants, volume 5, pages505–511 (2019) 

Joram’s favourite plant has the biggest leaves. This palm is a total cheat so let’s praise giant rhubarb instead.

Our listener question of the day: do you think we can eat everything that dinosaurs could eat?

Ever wonder why you get so sleepy during conference talks? Turns out lots of conference venues aren't well-ventilated, causing CO2 to rise to levels that cause drowsiness (>1000ppm). Data from @keflavich shows this steady rise over the first 50min of a conference session. pic.twitter.com/AjFO2eQDrJ

Hyphens hurt your citation count

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

This week, we’re trying something new! Instead of doing a longer episode with two papers, we’re doing just one paper and instead release weekly! All thanks to us benevolent researchers listening to the voices of you, the common people of instagram.

This week, Joram is nerding out about Harry Bittercress, the newest star on the firmament of young adult research articles. Tegan’s favourite plant is super slick and super endangered and then we have an app for you and some feline fun facts. If you don’t listen to this episode, then someone else will, so be prepared!

Joram’s paper: The role of APETALA1 in petal number robustness, Marie Monniaux, Bjorn Pieper, Sarah M McKim, Anne-Lise Routier-Kierzkowska, Daniel Kierzkowski, Richard S Smith, Angela Hay, eLife 2018;7:e39399 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.39399

Give us your best Harry Bittercress book titles in the comments!

Pl@ntnet, the best plant identification app with the worst name.

Tegan’s story on how cats lie down, rest but also sleep.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Heyyy it’s another episode of the plants and pipettes podcast! This week, we have something special for you: we talked to Ratan Chopra, researcher at the University of Minnesota about his work domesticating pennycress. Sounds familiar? Yes! We presented his research on the blog and now had the chance to talk to him directly.

Ratan works in the lab of David Marks who is pioneering and driving forward the work on pennycress. Using its close family relationship to Arabidopsis, he and his group were able to quickly advance the knowledge and domestication of pennycress, turning it from a weed into a soon-to-be crop plant.

A few words on the words we used in the episode:

EMS: Ethyl methanesulfonate, a chemical used to induce random mutations. This is the first step to create a mutated population to be screened for relevant phenotypes.

M2 and M3: generation 2 and 3 after mutating the seeds, similar to F2 and F3 for regular offspring.

You can reach Ratan on twitter here. Thanks to Ratan for taking the time and talking to us!

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Welcome again to another episode of our little podcast. This week, we’re talking about the intricacies of Saffron and

Tegan’s paper: Schmidt, T. , Heitkam, T. , Liedtke, S. , Schubert, V. and Menzel, G. (2019), Adding color to a century‐old enigma: multi‐color chromosome identification unravels the autotriploid nature of saffron (Crocus sativus) as a hybrid of wild Crocus cartwrightianus cytotypes. New Phytol, 222: 1965-1980. doi:10.1111/nph.15715

Joram’s paper: The Role of Plastidic Trigger Factor Serving Protein Biogenesis in Green Algae and Land Plants, Marina Rohr, Fabian Ries, Claudia Herkt, Vincent Leon Gotsmann, Lisa Désirée Westrich, Karin Gries, Raphael Trösch, Jens Christmann, Frederic Chaux-Jukic, Martin Jung, David Zimmer, Timo Mühlhaus, Frederik Sommer, Michael Schroda, Sandro Keller, Torsten Möhlmann, Felix Willmund, Plant Physiology Mar 2019, 179 (3) 1093-1110; DOI: 10.1104/pp.18.01252

The “crouching dragon” protein structure from the paper. Judge for yourself if you see a dragon.

Tegan’s favourite plant is Nuytsia floribunda or the Australian Christmas Tree.

Emily Blincoe’s flower arrangements

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!