GPC e-bulletin Sept

Following the success of the New Breeding Technologies workshop in July, we have developed a series of resources on genome editing, which are available on the New Breeding Technologies page of our website. Here you’ll find a number of presentations given at the workshop on a wide variety of subjects, as well as the GPC’s consensus statement on genome editing.

Please do have a read through our consensus statement on genome editing and feel free to use its text in discussions on new breeding technologies. Where possible, please do let us know how it has been used so that we can trace its impact! You can download it from the bottom of our New Breeding Technologies page on our website.

We also published a great blog post from Dr. Staffan Eklöf, Swedish Board of Agriculture, explaining how his team analyzed EU regulations on genetic modification and their interpretation that some gene-edited plants are not regulated as genetically modified organisms.
The Regulator’s perspective: Why some gene-edited plants are not GM-regulated in Sweden

Finally, if you’re looking for a new job, check out the hashtag ‘#PlantSciJobs‘ on Twitter. We recently tweeted another batch of job opportunities tagged as #PlantSciJobs, and you’ll find a wealth of jobs shared by other institutions too!

If you have news you would like us to share on our website, please contact sarah@globalplantcouncil.org

In New Phytologist: American oaks share a common northern ancestor
New research tells the story of the evolutionary history of American oaks for the first time.

Lightning-fast trappers
With the help of a high-speed camera, the researchers analyzed the “capture behavior” of the suction trap of Utricularia australis and possible escape attempts of one of its natural prey species, the water flea Ceriodaphnia dubia. They discovered that the fleas are sucked into the traps with 2800 times the acceleration of gravity and are decelerated inside the trap nearly as quickly.

Auxin drives leaf flattening
Scientists from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology in Beijing discovered that the classical phytohormone auxin enables leaf blade expansion and leaf flattening.

Plant geneticists develop a new application of CRISPR to break yield barriers in crops
Using tomato as an example, scientists mobilized CRISPR/Cas9 technology to rapidly generate variants of the plant that display a broad continuum of three separate, agriculturally important traits: fruit size, branching architecture and overall plant shape.

In New Phytologist: Scientists propose “universal laws” on the size and biology of plant seeds
Mathematical models and an exhaustive data analysis of 500 plant species were used to show that the global distribution of dormancy and seed size follow a predictable pattern that depends on climate oscillations.

If you have a conference, meeting, workshop, training course or other event coming up, we can include it in our Events calendar! Please email sarah@globalplantcouncil.org

Plant Biology Europe 2018
18–21 June 2018. Copenhagen, Denmark.

International Conference on Arabidopsis Research 2018
24–28 June 2018. Turku, Finland.

Would you like to contribute an article to the GPC’s blog? Please get in touch! Email sarah@globalplantcouncil.org

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