Plant Science Stories
SFGate: Glowing roots illuminate plant secrets
On SFGate: Carnegie's José Dinneny uses firefly proteins to light up certain plants and reveal root system behavior....
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Firefly protein enables visualization of roots in soil
Stanford, CA— Plants form a vast network of below-ground roots that search soil for needed resources. The structure and function of this root network can be highly adapted to particular...
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Carnegie’s Frommer elected to German Academy
Stanford, CA—Wolf B. Frommer, Director of Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology, has been elected as a member of the German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, one of the world’s...
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Deep into deserts: A letter from Carnegie President Matthew Scott
In 1903 the Carnegie Institution established a Desert Laboratory to explore the properties of desert plants. From that humble stone building in Tucson, Arizona, eventually emerged our spectacular...
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Breeding Higher Yielding Crops by Increasing Sugar Import into Seeds
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Plant Metabolic Protein Tailored for Nighttime Growth
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New Way to Watch Plant-Cell Walls Assemble
Scientists, including Carnegie’s David Ehrhardt and Heather Cartwright, have exploited a way to watch protein trafficking to make cellulose in the formation of plant cell walls in real time.
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Zhiyong Wang Receives Germany’s Humboldt Research Award
Washington, DC— Carnegie’s Zhiyong Wang will receive the Humboldt Research Award, one of Germany’s most-prestigious prizes. Granted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation up to...
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Digital genome
Revolutionary progress in understanding plant biology is being driven through advances in DNA sequencing technology. Carnegie plant scientists have played a key role in the sequencing and genome annotation efforts of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the soil alga ...
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David Ehrhardt
Plants are not as static as you think. David Ehrhardt combines confocal microscopy with novel visualization methods to see the three-dimensional movement  within live plant cells to reveal the other-worldly cell choreography that makes up plant tissues. These methods allow his group to explore...
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Sue Rhee
Plants are essential to life on Earth and provide us with food, fuel, clothing, and shelter.  Despite all this, we know very little about how they do what they do. Even for the best-studied species, such as Arabidopsis thaliana --a wild mustard studied in the lab--we know about less than 20%...
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Zhiyong Wang - Acting Director
Zhiyong Wang was appointed acting director of Department of Plant Biology in 2018. Wang’s research aims to understand how plant growth is controlled by environmental and endogenous signals. Being sessile, plants respond environmental changes by altering their growth behavior. As such, plants...
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SFGate: Glowing roots illuminate plant secrets
On SFGate: Carnegie's José Dinneny uses firefly proteins to light up certain plants and reveal root system behavior. More
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Carnegie’s José Dinneny Selected HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholar
Stanford, CA—The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Simons Foundation have awarded José Dinneny, of Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology an HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholar grant. He is one...
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Amoeba may offer key clue to photosynthetic evolution
Stanford, CA—The major difference between plant and animal cells is the photosynthetic process, which converts light energy into chemical energy. When light isn’t available, energy is generated by...
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Pennycress
DOE awards biofuel research team including Carnegie plant biologists
August 3, 2020

Palo Alto, CA— Carnegie’s Sue Rhee and Moises Exposito-Alonso are leading members of an initiative to identify genes related to stress tolerance in the mustard plant field pennycress. Theirs was one of seven biofuel research projects awarded a total of $68 million over five years by the Department of Energy. 

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humankind and scientists from a wide variety of fields are applying their expertise to help understand and mitigate its effects. This includes plant scientists, whose work can help maintain food security in a warming climate, sequester carbon pollution from the atmosphere, and develop renewable energy

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Moises Exposito-Alonso
Exposito-Alonso honored for outstanding early career achievements
July 14, 2020

Palo Alto, CA— Carnegie evolutionary geneticist Moises Exposito-Alonso was awarded a Max Planck Society’s Otto Hahn Medal for early career excellence. The prize is endowed with 7,500 euros.

Since 1978, the society has recognized outstanding scientific achievements among its recent Ph.D. recipients with the goal of motivating particularly talented individuals to pursue academic research careers. The 2020 award was given to six scientists in the biological and medical fields; 10 in human sciences; and 10 in the chemistry, physics, and technology sector. The recipients are nominated by the directors of the Max Planck Institutes at which they conducted their doctoral

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Greenhouse in Germany where Exposito-Alonso did research.
Exposito-Alonso recognized by Heidelberg Academy of Science
April 10, 2020

Palo Alto, CA— Carnegie’s Moises Exposito-Alonso was selected for the Heidelberg Academy of Science’s Karl Freudenberg Prize in recognition of outstanding early career achievements in the natural sciences. The prize comes with a personal 10,000 Euro award.

Representing the German state of Baden-Württemberg, the academy honors several professors under the age of 40 with endowed prizes each year, including six in 2020. All of the recipients will give public presentations of their work, with dates to be announced. An evolutionary geneticist, Exposito-Alonso received his doctorate in 2018 from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübigen.

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Moises Exposito-Alonso
Carnegie's Exposito-Alonso selected for Forbes’ “Under 30” list
March 18, 2020

Washington, DC— Carnegie evolutionary geneticist Moises Exposito-Alonso was named a member of the 2020 class of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Europe list in science and healthcare. 

He was recognized for his lab’s pioneering use of genomic techniques to understand how plant species will evolve and keep pace with a changing climate. 

Out of the thousands of nominees, the 30 finalists in each of the 10 categories comprise “the world’s most impactful community of young entrepreneurs and game-changers,” said the publication in announcing his selection.  

“Growing up in southern Spain, I saw how Mediterranean

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Digital genome

Revolutionary progress in understanding plant biology is being driven through advances in DNA sequencing technology. Carnegie plant scientists have played a key role in the sequencing and genome annotation efforts of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the soil alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Now that many genomes from algae to mosses and trees are publicly available, this information can be mined using bioinformatics to build models to understand gene function and ultimately for designing plants for a wide spectrum of applications.

 Carnegie researchers have pioneered a genome-wide gene association network Aranet that can assign functions

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Moises Exposito-Alonso

Evolutionary geneticist Moises Exposito-Alonso joined the Department of Plant Biology as a staff associate in September 2019. He investigates whether and how plants will evolve to keep pace with climate change by conducting large-scale ecological and genome sequencing experiments. He also develops computational methods to derive fundamental principles of evolution, such as how fast natural populations acquire new mutations and how past climates shaped continental-scale biodiversity patterns. His goal is to use these first principles and computational approaches to forecast evolutionary outcomes of populations under climate change to anticipate potential future

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Zhiyong Wang - Acting Director

Zhiyong Wang was appointed acting director of Department of Plant Biology in 2018.

Wang’s research aims to understand how plant growth is controlled by environmental and endogenous signals. Being sessile, plants respond environmental changes by altering their growth behavior. As such, plants display high developmental plasticity and their growth is highly sensitive to environmental conditions. Plants have evolved many hormones that function as growth regulators, and growth is also responsive to the availability of nutrients and energy (photosynthates).

To understand how plant cells perceive and transduce various regulatory signals, and how combinations of complex

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Matthew Evans

Matthew Evans wants to provide new tools for plant scientists to engineer better seeds for human needs. He focuses on one of the two phases to their life cycle. In the first phase, the sporophyte is the diploid generation—that is with two similar sets of chromosomes--that undergoes meiosis to produce cells called spores. Each spore divides forming a single set of chromosomes (haploid) --the gametophyte--which produces the sperm and egg cells.

Evans studies how the haploid genome is required for normal egg and sperm function. In flowering plants, the female gametophyte, called the embryo sac, consists of four cell types: the egg cell, the central cell, and two types of

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David Ehrhardt

Plants are not as static as you think. David Ehrhardt combines confocal microscopy with novel visualization methods to see the three-dimensional movement  within live plant cells to reveal the other-worldly cell choreography that makes up plant tissues. These methods allow his group to explore cell-signaling and cell-organizational events as they unfold.

These methods allow his lab to investigate plant cell development and structure and molecular genetics to understand the organization and dynamic behaviors of molecules and organelles. The group tackles how cells generate asymmetries and specific shapes. A current focus is how the cortical microtubule cytoskeleton— an

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