The Taproot

In this episode, Ivan and Liz talk with Carolyn Lawrence-Dill, an Associate Professor of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology as well as Agronomy at Iowa State University. We discuss a paper from her grad school days that has a great back story about how to bring a large number of people together to agree on a common system of nomenclature. It turns out that it’s both important and challenging to do and we had a great conversation touching on egos, politics and grad student projects.

Read more about this episode: https://plantae.org/blog/taproot-podcast-s1e2-normalizing-nomenclature-and-the-idealism-of-youth-with-carolyn-lawrence-dill/

SHOW NOTES:

Lawrence et al., 2004 http://jcb.rupress.org/content/167/1/19.long

Maize GDB https://www.maizegdb.org

Carolyn’s website https://dill-picl.org

Ron Vale shows animation of kinesin walking (start at 25:00)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RUHJhskW00

@IAcornflake

@ehaswell

@BaxterTWI

In this episode, the hosts and Sophien discuss a recent collaborative paper (Islam et al., 2016, BMC Biology) that really embodies the concepts of open science. It addresses the source and characterization of a newly discovered wheat blast in Bangladesh. Wheat blast is a fungal disease that affects grasses that are a huge threat to food security. The authors report the geographical distribution of this new disease, characterize the disease symptoms of affected plants, and isolate and validate the causal fungus. Most strikingly, they performed RNA sequencing on symptomatic and asymptomatic leaves and show that RNA from these infected leaves aligns to the genome of a Brazilian wheat blast strain. They conclude that the Bangladesh isolate of wheat blast is phylogenetically related to the Brazilian wheat blast, rather than an unknown or new lineage.

_____

Islam et al. 2016 https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-016-0309-7

Kamoun, 2012 http://kamounlab.dreamhosters.com/pdfs/MicrobiologyToday_2012.pdf

Open Wheatblast http://s620715531.websitehome.co.uk/owb/

ASAPBio http://asapbio.org

BioRxiv http://www.biorxiv.org

@KamounLabTwitter

Kamoun Lab webpage http://kamounlab.tumblr.com

@baxterTWI

@ehaswell

Contact: [email protected]

_____

Read more about this episode: https://plantae.org/blog/taproot-episode-1-season-1-extreme-open-science-and-the-meaning-of-scientific-impact-with-sophien-kamoun/

The Taproot is the podcast that digs beneath the surface to understand how scientific publications are created. In each episode, we take a paper from the plant biology literature and talk about the story behind the science with one of the authors.