Plant Science Stories
Plant Science
Calcium and reproduction go together
AudioStanford, CA—Everyone’s heard of the birds and the bees. But that old expression leaves out the flowers that are being fertilized. The...
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Plant Science
Water found to provide blueprints for root architecture
AudioStanford, CA—Soil is a microscopic maze of nooks and crannies that hosts a wide array of life. Plants explore this environment by...
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Plant Science
MAD: Scientists shed light on braking mechanisms in cellular signaling
AudioStanford, CA— A team of researchers studying a flowering plant has zeroed in on the way cells manage external signals about prevailing...
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Plant Science
Communicating with the world across the border
AudioStanford, CA—All living cells are held together by membranes, which provide a barrier to the transport of nutrients. They are also the...
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Plant Science
Decoding the chemical vocabulary of plants
AudioStanford, CA—Plants spend their entire lifetime rooted to one spot. When faced with a bad situation, such as a swarm of hungry...
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Plant Science
New technique will accelerate genetic characterization of photosynthesis
AudioStanford, CA— Photosynthesis provides fixed carbon and energy for nearly all life on Earth, yet many aspects of this fascinating process...
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Plant Science
Drought hormones measured
Audio Stanford, CA—Floods and droughts are increasingly in the news, and climate experts say their frequency will only go up in the future....
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Plant Science
Roots and the Hidden Half of Plant Biology
March 27, 2014 Dr. José R. Dinneny, Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Plant Biology We see plants everywhere in our daily lives, but half of the plant, the root system, is hidden from...
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Plant Science
Understanding "hydropatterning" in roots
Fresh water constitutes less than 1% of the surface water on earth, yet the importance of this simple molecule to all life forms is immeasurable. Water represents the most vital reagent for chemical reactions occurring in a cell. In plants, water provides the structural support necessary for plant...
Explore this Project
Plant Science
Salinity and plants
Today, humanity is increasingly aware of the impact it has on the environment and the difficulties caused when the environment impacts our communities. Environmental change can be particularly harsh when the plants we use for food, fuel, feed and fiber are affected by this change. High salinity is...
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Plant Science
The fight on rice blight
Carnegie will receive Phase II funding through Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that enables individuals worldwide to test bold ideas to address persistent health and development challenges. Department of Plant Biology Director Wolf...
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Meet Carnegie Scientists
Plant Science
Sue Rhee, Acting Director
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% of...
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Plant Science
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...
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Plant Science
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...
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Plant Science
Green algae could be key to engineering faster-growing crops
How do green algae grow so quickly?  Two new collaborations offer insight into how these organisms siphon carbon dioxide from the air for use in photosynthesis, a key factor in their ability to...
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Plant Science
Breakthrough: sensors monitor cells at work
Stanford, CA—Transport proteins are responsible for moving materials such as nutrients and metabolic products through a cell’s outer membrane, which seals and protects all living cells, to the cell’s...
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Plant Science
Ehrhardt named Royal Microscopical Society honorary fellow
Stanford, CA— Carnegie’s David Ehrhardt has been awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal Microscopical Society. It was announced during the society’s Botanical Microscopy 2015 meeting at Exeter...
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Carnegie’s Arthur Grossman Receives Human Frontier Science Program Grant
April 9, 2018

Palo Alto, CA—Senior scientist Arthur Grossman of Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology was part of a team* awarded a three-year grant, with $100,000 for each year, from the International Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Organization. The team will use an integrated approach to investigate how light and metabolic signals control photosynthetic processes in algae.  

HFSP’s collaborative research grants are given for endeavors that address “complex mechanisms of living organisms.” The program only supports “cutting-edge, risky projects” conducted by globally distributed teams.

Grossman has been studying algae for years.  Algae dominate the oceans, produce half of the

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Walls, toxicity and explosions: How plant cells protect themselves from salinity in soil
February 16, 2018

Stanford, CA—Roots face many challenges in the soil in order to supply the plant with the necessary water and nutrients.  New work from Carnegie and Stanford University’s José Dinneny shows that one of these challenges, salinity, can cause root cells to explode if the risk is not properly sensed. The findings, published by Current Biology, could help scientists improve agricultural productivity in saline soils, which occur across the globe and reduce crop yields.

Salts build up in soils from natural causes, such as sea spray, or can be introduced as a consequence of irrigation and poor land management. Salinity has deleterious effects on plant health and limits crop yields,

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Carnegie Science, Carnegie Institution, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University
Seeing in the dark: how plant roots perceive water through growth
January 9, 2018

Washington, DC— Without eyes, ears, or a central nervous system, plants can perceive the direction of environmental cues and respond to ensure their survival.

For example, roots need to extend through the maze of nooks and crannies in the soil toward sources of water and nutrients. The various ways that plants guide this branching to take advantage of their environment is of great interest to scientists and of potential use by farmers in need of crops that produce more food with fewer resources.

Carnegie and Stanford University biologist José Dinneny has spent years studying how root growth responds to water, particularly through a phenomenon called hydropatterning, which

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Science News Selected Carnegie’s José Dinneny as “Scientist to Watch”
October 4, 2017

Science News magazine has selected José Dinneny, of Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology, as one of ten young scientists to watch in 2017. The researchers were selected because they are likely to make big discoveries. The investigators are spotlighted in the October 14 edition of Science News available online today at www.sciencenews.org/SN10.

Dinneny looks at the mechanisms plants use to sense water availability and survive stressful conditions such as drought and high salinity. He investigates developmental pathways and molecular genetic mechanisms involved in shaping the plant to suit the environment. His work has included the processes of water-stress responses in plants at

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Understanding "hydropatterning" in roots

Fresh water constitutes less than 1% of the surface water on earth, yet the importance of this simple molecule to all life forms is immeasurable. Water represents the most vital reagent for chemical reactions occurring in a cell. In plants, water provides the structural support necessary for plant growth. It acts as the carrier for nutrients absorbed from the soil and transported to the shoot. It also provides the chemical components necessary to generate sugar and biomass from light and carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. While the importance of water to plants is clear, an understanding as to how plants perceive water is limited. Most studies have focused on environmental conditions

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Salinity and plants

Today, humanity is increasingly aware of the impact it has on the environment and the difficulties caused when the environment impacts our communities. Environmental change can be particularly harsh when the plants we use for food, fuel, feed and fiber are affected by this change. High salinity is an agricultural contaminant of increasing significance. Not only does this limit the land available for use in agriculture, but in land that has been used for generations, the combination of irrigation and evaporation gradually leads to increasing soil salinity.

The Dinneny lab focuses on understanding how developmental processes such as cell-type specification regulate responses to

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The fight on rice blight

Carnegie will receive Phase II funding through Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that enables individuals worldwide to test bold ideas to address persistent health and development challenges. Department of Plant Biology Director Wolf Frommer,  with a team of researchers from the International Rice Research Institute, Kansas State University, and Iowa State University, will continue to pursue an innovative global health research project, titled “Transformative Strategy for Controlling Rice Blight.”

Rice bacterial blight is one of the major challenges to food security, and this project aims to achieve broad, durable

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A family of metabolite sensors

Carnegie researchers recently constructed genetically encoded FRET sensors for a variety of important molecules such as glucose and glutamate. The centerpiece of these sensors is a recognition element derived from the superfamily of bacterial binding protiens called periplasmic binding protein (PBPs), proteins that are primary receptors for moving chemicals  for hundreds of different small molecules. PBPs are ideally suited for sensor construction. The scientists fusie individual PBPs with a pair of variants and produced a large set of sensors, e.g. for sugars like maltose, ribose and glucose or for the neurotransmitter glutamate. These sensors have been adopted for measurement of sugar

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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 interior

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José Dinneny

One way to adapt to climate change is to understand how plants can thrive in the changing environment. José Dinneny looks at the mechanisms that control environmental responses in plants, including responses to salty soils and different moisture conditions—work that provides the foundation for developing crops for the changing climate.

The Dinneny  lab focuses on understanding how developmental processes such as cell-type specification regulate responses to environmental change. Most studies have considered the organ or even the whole organism as a single responsive unit and ignore the potential diversity of responses by the various cell-types composing an organism. Dinneny has

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Kathryn Barton

Understanding how plants grow can lead to improving crops.  Plant scientist Kathryn Barton, who joined Carnegie in 2001, investigates just that: what controls the plant’s body plan, from  the time it’s an embryo to its adult leaves. These processes include how plant parts form different orientations, from top to bottom, and different poles. She looks at regulation by small RNA’s, the function of small so-called Zipper proteins, and how hormone biosynthesis and response controls the plant’s growth.

Despite an enormous variety in leaf shape and arrangement, the basic body plan of plants is about the same: stems and leaves alternate in repeating units. The structure responsible for

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Sue Rhee, Acting Director

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% of what its genes do and how or why they do it. And understanding this evolution can help develop new crop strains to adapt to climate change.  

Sue Rhee wants to uncover the molecular mechanisms underlying adaptive traits in plants to understand how these traits evolved. A bottleneck has been the limited understanding of the functions of most plant genes. Rhee’s group is building genome-wide

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