Plant Biology Graduate students Kelly Allen, Rebecca Brennan, Jedy Chilufya, Stavroula Fili, Harry Klein, Ian McCahill, Jarrett Man, Christina Stonoha, and Xiang Li have been awarded Lotta M. Crabtree Fellowships to support their work in the Spring 2019 semester.  The Lotta M. Crabtree Fellowships are awarded on a competitive basis.  

A new predictive model suggests that climate change may allow common ragweed to extend its growing range northward and into major northeast metro areas, worsening conditions for millions of people with hay fever and asthma. 

Plant ecologist Kristina Stinson, Environmental Conservation, who leads a research team that has been studying this plant for over a decade – particularly how it responds to elevated CO2 levels – worked with climate modeler and corresponding author Michael Case at University of Washington on this project. Details appear online in the journal PLOS One, and were also featured in The Daily Hampshire Gazette, as well as University of Washington News. Read more

Iron deficiency anemia is a huge global problem. It affects 2 billion people, particularly in low-income countries where many rely on grain as a staple. Yet so far, plants have managed to outwit our efforts to convince them to carry more iron. University of Massachusetts Amherst molecular biologist Elsbeth Walker has received a three-year $870,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to discover exactly how plants regulate the amount of iron they take up through their roots. Read More

A new study by Jonathan Giacomini and his former advisor, evolutionary ecologist Lynn Adler at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with others, found that eating sunflower pollen dramatically and consistently reduced a protozoan pathogen infection in bumble bees and reduced a microsporidian pathogen of the European honey bee, raising the possibility that sunflowers may provide a simple solution to improve the health of economically and ecologically important pollinators. Read more