Anne Osterrieder has a new series on her blog called Faces of plant cell biologists, where we are asked a series of questions. So far, it has featured Charlotte Carroll (also an AoBBlog.com guest author here), Chris Hawes and Kentaro Tamura, who all answer Anne’s questions is surprisingly contrasting but  complementary ways. Today, I have been [...]

Waiting for ages for a bus to come along only for two to arrive at once is guaranteed to raise a frown, or worse. But, in this instance, two buses together are having a quite different effect. The buses concerned are two back-to-back ‘Letters’ that appeared on October 23 2011 in the journal Nature (Licausi [...]

The three Genetics Societies in Italy – AGI, SIBV and SIGA – held a strong joint conference in Assisi in September. With 500 people and 300 posters, the major sessions were on topical issues such as epigenetics and epigenomics, then genome plasticity, moving on to systems biology. , Approaches included whole genome sequencing, annotation and functional analysis, and focussed on many crops and some animal genetics

Over the years, hundreds of papers have been published describing the genetic changes that occur during evolution of plants, and the differences evident between individual species. An equally high number of papers has been published about the definition of species, their separation and naming. Many have joined discussions of where and why new species form [...]