5-Mar-2026
This odd little plant could help turbocharge crop yields

this is about engineering #Rubisco being more efficient in #hornworts

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1118588

#science #plants #plantphysiology #crops

Are smaller stomata faster in reacting to environmental changes such as light, CO2, atmospheric humidity, temperature ? I have participated with our data in a group publication where we take a closer look at the "Speedy small stomata" paradigm.
Using data from over 80 plant species, we found only weak correlations between stomatal size and maximum stomatal closing or opening speeds as well as response times.
Instead, stomatal speed appears to be context-dependent, shaped by species-specific traits, stomatal type and broader anatomical and physiological features.
These findings support a trait-based approach to assessing stomatal kinetics, which has implications for understanding #EcosystemFunctioning under #ClimateChange and #CropBreeding for higher #WaterUseEfficiency and #photosynthesis.

Woning et al. Revisiting the relationship between stomatal size and speed across species – a meta-analysis

https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fnph.70842

#AcademicChatter #BioDiversity #ClimateChange #PlantPhysiology
#Stomata

please #Share / Boost widely in your #AcademicNetworks : A #SeniorLecturerPosition in botany and mycology with a research activity in #PlantPhysiology will be open for competition in spring 2026 at the Silva joint research unit / Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France.

https://silva.nancy.hub.inrae.fr/actualites/postes-de-mc-a-l-universite-de-lorraine

The lecturer will be involved in teaching (lectures, tutorials and practical work) as part of the pharmaceutical studies programme, focusing mainly on botany, mycology and plant biology. Teaching has to be done in French.
Whereas the research will focus on the acclimation of trees by molecular mechanisms to the increasingly severe environmental constraints (ozone, drought, heat waves). The research will be done int he PHARE team
https://silva.nancy.hub.inrae.fr/equipes-de-recherche/phare

Application dates for positions on the Odyssée platform: 3 March (10 a.m.) to 3 April (4 p.m.) 2026
https://odyssee.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/

#science #career #sciencejobs
#Forests #PlantScience #Botany #Mycology #SciJobs #Vacancy #JobVacancy #JobOpening #JobOpportunity #ResearchJobs #LecturerOpening
#Academia #Biodiversity #ClimateChange @[email protected]
#universitedelorraine

14-Jan-2026
Plant discovery could lead to new ways of producing #medicines

The study focused on a #plant called Flueggea suffruticosa, which produces a particularly powerful #alkaloid known as securinine. While investigating how this chemical is made, scientists discovered that the process is driven by a gene that looks more like it comes from #bacteria than from a plant.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1112631

#science #ecology #plantPhysiology #NaturalProducts

“Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God”*…

It’s easy to feel hope in the advances that the world has made in eraditcating extreme poverty over the last several decades. But as Max Roser writes, unless the poorest economies start growing, this period of progress against the worst form of poverty is over…

In the last decades, the world has made fantastic progress against extreme poverty. In 1990, 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Since then, the number of extremely poor people has declined by 1.5 billion people.

This means on any average day in the last 35 years, about 115,000 people left extreme poverty behind.1 Leaving the very worst poverty behind doesn’t mean a life free of want, but it does mean a big change. Additional income matters most for those who have the least. It means having the chance to leave hunger behind, to gain access to clean water, to access better healthcare, and to have at least some electricity — for light at night and perhaps even to cook and heat.

Can we expect this rapid progress to continue?

Unfortunately, we cannot. Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase.

To understand why the rapid progress against deep poverty will not continue into the future, we need to know why the world made progress in the past.

Extreme poverty declined in the last three decades because, back in the 1990s, the majority of the poorest people on the planet lived in countries that subsequently achieved very fast economic growth. In Indonesia and China, more than two-thirds of the population lived in extreme poverty. But these economies then grew rapidly, so that by today, the share has declined to less than 10%. Other large Asian countries — including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines — also achieved strong growth, and as a consequence, the share living in extreme poverty declined rapidly. Much of the progress happened in Asia, but conditions in other regions improved too: the share living in extreme poverty also declined in Ghana, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Panama, Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries.

This chart shows the economic change in these countries over the past decades. As incomes increased, the share of people in extreme poverty declined.

What is different today is that the majority of the world’s poorest people are stuck in economies that have been stagnating for a long time.Consider the case of Madagascar. In the long run, the country has not seen any growth at all: GDP per capita in Madagascar is about the same today as it was in 1950. As a consequence, the number of people in extreme poverty increased in line with the country’s population growth. In richer countries, it is possible to reduce poverty by reducing inequality through redistribution, but a country like Madagascar cannot reduce its share of people in extreme poverty through redistribution. This is because the mean income is lower than the poverty line; if everyone had the same income, everyone would be living in extreme poverty.

The situation is similar in other countries, as the chart below shows: in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Malawi, Burundi, and the Central African Republic, more than half of the population lives in extreme poverty. As their economies have stagnated, the deep poverty that most people live in has remained largely unchanged for decades.

This is why we have to expect the end of progress against extreme poverty based on current trends. If the poorest economies remain stagnant, hundreds of millions of people will continue to live in extreme poverty.

I’m always skeptical when people say that we are at a juncture in history where the future looks much different than the past. But when it comes to the fight against extreme poverty, I fear it is true. Today, the majority of the world’s poorest people are living in economies that have not achieved economic growth in the recent past… Based on current trends, we have to expect the end of progress against extreme poverty…

… It’s no news that we should expect an end to progress against extreme poverty. This article is an update of an article I published in 2019, in which I wrote the same: the fact that the poorest economies are not growing means that the rapid progress against extreme poverty seen in the last decades will end.

Although this prospect has been known for years, it has hardly received the attention it deserves. Progress against extreme poverty was one of humanity’s most outstanding achievements of the past decades — the end of it would be one of the very worst realities of the coming ones.

Importantly, however, these projections are not predictions; their purpose is not to describe what the world in 2030 or 2040 will certainly look like. These projections describe what we have to expect based on current trends; they tell us about our present world rather than the reality of tomorrow. Current trends don’t have to become future facts: many countries left extreme poverty behind in the past, because they had a moment at which they broke out of stagnation.

What these projections tell us, however, is that if the poorest countries do not start to grow, a very bleak future is ahead of us: a future in which extreme poverty remains the reality for hundreds of millions for many years to come…

Eminently worth reading in full– and acting on: “The end of progress against extreme poverty?” from @maxroser.bsky.social and @ourworldindata.org.

* Proverbs 14:31, NIV

###

As we put our shoulders to the wheel, we might spare a thought for a man who contributed mightily to our capacity to feed humanity, Kenneth V. Thimann; he died on this date in 1997. A microbiologist, he was a pioneer in plant physiology (especially the hormones that control the development of plants). Building on the thinking of Frits Went, he identified the first plant hormone to be discovered– the first auxin, a class of growth hormones, and revealed its chemical structure– which proved very important to agriculture and its yields.

source

🎉 Great news! The paper ‘Carbon dioxide or photosynthetically active radiation? Evaluation of the significance of individual environmental factors that control leaf stomatal development’ in @AnnBot by Jan Pleva and co-authors is now #free for a limited time period 🧵(1/8)

👉https://doi.org/qkwg

#PlantScience #PlantPhysiology #Stomata #Photosynthesis #Botany

Photoperiodism (Zoology 🦥)

Photoperiod is the change of day length over the seasons. Earth's rotation around its axis produces 24-hour changes in light and dark cycles on Earth. The length of the light and dark in each phase varies across the seasons due to the axial tilt of Earth. The photoperiod defines the length of the light. For example, in summer the lengt...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoperiodism

#Photoperiodism #Botany #Zoology #CircadianRhythm #PlantPhysiology #AnimalPhysiology