RV: Wheat bacteria may ward off plant disease

 

 

Fuente: Flinders News
Expuesto el: lunes, 02 de abril de 2012 11:31
Autor: Marketing and Communications
Asunto: Wheat bacteria may ward off plant disease

 

A Flinders University researcher is digging deep to discover how certain bacterial strains found in wheat can stimulate a plant's natural defence fighting mechanisms. Biotech graduate and PhD candidate Tanya Bernardo (pictured) has spent the past four years studying a beneficial bacterium living in wheat, and the role it plays in helping plants fight off disease. To support her investigations, Ms Bernardo coated plant seeds with the wheat bacteria before injecting them with a plant pathogen – a biological microbe that causes diseases – to determine whether the bacteria stimulated an immune response. While other field studies have already established the positive external effects of wheat bacteria on plants, Ms Bernardo said her research, funded by the Grains Research Development Corporation, was the first of its kind to identify what internal factors lead to the most effective protection. "Previous research has just looked at the outside of a plant to confirm the bacteria's positive defence effect  but not a lot has been done to investigate exactly how the plant fights off disease and what mechanisms are involved in it being protected," the 25-year-old said. "But I really wanted to find out why pre-treated plants have a better survival rate than those that don't get the bacterial treatment, and what factors result in the most effective form of treatment." Ms Bernardo said her findings had shown diseased plants that were treated with the good bacteria developed a defence response protein "growing in abundance". "It really opens the door to further study because I only looked at one type of good bacteria living in wheat but there are dozens of others that could stimulate the same defence proteins." Now in the writing phase of her project, Ms Bernardo said she hoped the findings could be used to develop a "bacterial inoculation" that could be used across Australia's grain industry. "Developing a vaccine would be far less invasive that using pesticides to fight disease and it might actually stimulate plant growth as well. "That would result in significant improvements in crop yields and less use of fertilisers."

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RV: Russian scientists regenerate ice age plant

 

 

Fuente: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk
Expuesto el: martes, 21 de febrero de 2012 12:19
Autor: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk
Asunto: Russian scientists regenerate ice age plant

 

Experiment used fruit and seeds from a Siberian squirrel burrow that had been stuck in the permafrost for over 30,000 years It was an ice age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species. The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds. The experiment proves that permafrost serves as a natural depository for ancient life forms, said the Russian researchers, who published their findings in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. "We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth's surface," the scientists said in the article. Canadian researchers had earlier regenerated some significantly younger plants from seeds found in burrows. Svetlana Yashina of the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who led the regeneration effort, said the revived plant looked very similar to its modern version, which still grows in the same area in north-eastern Siberia. "It's a very viable plant, and it adapts really well," she said in a telephone interview from the Russian town of Pushchino where her lab is located. She said she hoped the team could continue its work and regenerate more plant species. The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma river, the sediments dating back over 30,000 years. The sediments were firmly cemented together and often filled with ice, making any water infiltration impossible – creating a natural freezing chamber fully isolated from the surface. "The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber," said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, who spent years rummaging through the area for squirrel burrows. "It's a natural cryobank." The burrows were located 125ft (38 metres) below the present surface in layers containing bones of large mammals, such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, horse and deer. Gubin said the study has demonstrated that tissue can survive ice conservation for tens of thousands of years, opening the way to the possible resurrection of ice age mammals. "If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue," Gubin said. "And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth." Japanese scientists are already searching in the same area for mammoth remains, but Gubin voiced hopes that the Russians will be the first to find some frozen animal tissue that could be used for regeneration. "It's our land, we will try to get them first," he said. Russia Europe Plants Genetics Biology   guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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RV: Researchers find classical musical compositions adhere to power law

 

 

Fuente: PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories
Expuesto el: martes, 21 de febrero de 2012 12:16
Autor: PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories
Asunto: Researchers find classical musical compositions adhere to power law

 

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of researchers, led by Daniel Levitin of McGill University, has found after analyzing over two thousand pieces of classical music that span four hundred years of history, that virtually all of them follow a one-over-f (1/f) power distribution equation. He and his team have published the results of their work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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