This discovery by Nobel prize winner Dr. Osama Shimomura known as Green Fluorescent has revolutionized molecular biology. Movement of living molecules generally can be seen but the advent of GFP made the invisible visible. The protein, found in jellyfish helps researchers track substances of all kinds, in real time, and show how they mark cells, maintain them and function in concert with other cells.
I met Geraint Parry on Twitter, where he tweets under @LiverpoolPlants about his research. Fortunately, my colleagues were able to confirm that he indeed is real and a plant cell biologist studying the nuclear pore complex. He also scored 6 out of 10 points from the “10 signs you might be a plant biologist” post, plus I awarded him two more points for having a picture of Arabidopsis thaliana as avatar. All evidence combined, Geraint immediately qualified as today’s Face of Plant Cell Biology – thanks for taking part, Geraint! :-)) Please check out Geraint’s website for more information and...
Plants don’t do much all day except sitting around and photosynthesising.Right? Wrong!! Plants move constantly, but much slower than animals. Therefore they manage to trick us by pretending to be really boring. But if you put up a hidden camera, take a picture every minute or hour and put it together to a time-lapse video, they won’t be able to fool you any longer. The “Plants in Motion” website created by Roger P. Hangarter has a really nice collection of plant time-lapse videos, ranging from germination to tropism (directional movement in response to an external signal such as light...
This post is part of the series “Faces of Plant Cell Biology”. In this series I am posting answers of plant cell biologists at all stages of their career to a set of five questions. If you are a plant cell biologist and would like to complete my questionnaire, please email me at anne@plantcellbiology.com. Seriously, please do – I am slowly but surely running out of colleagues to pester! Today’s Face of Plant Cell Biology is Dr Nathalie Leborgne-Castel from the Université de Bourgogne in France. Nathalie was kind enough to allow us to use her fantastic tomography and plasmolysis...
How many of these sound familiar? 1) When you open a new review about a conserved eukaryotic protein family, you first perform a whole document search for “plant” and “arabidopsis”. 2) People assume that you know the name of every plant and ask for your advice on growing vegetables. 3) You have looked at Monstera leaves and wondered if you could use these for your expression experiments. 4) You had a brown thumb before you were forced to care for your own plants for your experiments. 5) When you are in a restaurant, you automatically check if the table...
John Runions is a little bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – only that his two identities both have a Dr title. Most of his time he spends working, teaching and playing with the microscopes at Oxford Brookes University. But when nobody is watching, he puts on his cape of knowledge, takes his sword of science enthusiasm and leaps on air as “Dr Molecule” for BBC Radio Oxford. John’s website is like a little treasure chest, full with microscopy images and movies. You can even watch one of his presentations from the last GARNet meeting 2011 on YouTube...
It’s Friday and therefore I present you with two beautiful animations about the inner workings of a cell. Bring a packed lunch, your camera and a big bag of excitement and hop on the tour bus guiding you through an animal and a plant cell. “Over there you can see the world’s largest mitochondrion. Few people know that it was the inspiration for the Michelin man…” I hope that these videos will not only show you how complex and fascinating cells are, but also how much similarities there are between animal and plant cells. Cells rock!
If someone asked me about the three most important papers which my research is based on, I might have to think for a minute or so about two of them. But my choice for the third one (or first one, if you wish) would be very clear: “Boevink et al. 1998!” Petra Boevink, Karl Oparka, Simon Santa Cruz, Barry Martin, Alan Betteridge, Chris Hawes (1998). “Stacks on tracks: the plant Golgi apparatus travels on an actin/ER network”. Plant Journal 15(3): 441-447. In this study the researchers linked green fluorescent protein (GFP)...
The other day I was digging through my nut storage box (yes, we have enough nut varieties for cooking and baking to hand to give them their own box). I was looking for pine nuts to use in a pasta dish and came across a peanuts pack. Easily amused as I am I thought “oh well, if I can’t find pine nuts, I’ll just use peanuts. Their names are close enough!” However, then I started wondering about the difference between peanuts and pine nuts, especially as my boss is allergic to nuts but keeps emphasising how he can eat...
This post is part of the new series “Faces of Plant Cell Biology”. In this series I am going to post answers of plant cell biologists at all stages of their career to a set of five questions. For obvious reasons I expect this to at first feature researchers which I know quite well, simply because I hope that they will be more willing to complete the questionnaire! However, by no means this should indicate an order of importance and I am very keen to feature as many researchers as possible. If you are a plant cell biologist and...
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