A decade or so ago, scientists discovered genes they thought could be turned on to make plants take up more iron from the soil, enriching cereals, grains and other staple foods that feed millions of people around the world an iron-poor diet leading to iron deficiency anemia, says molecular biologist Elsbeth Walker at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “But it didn’t work,” she adds. “Somehow the plants downregulated our efforts, and we don’t understand how.”

Now Walker has a three-year, $870,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Physiological Mechanisms and Biomechanics program to learn how plants thwarted those past efforts and further, how plants firmly control iron in their systems. Read More

UMass Amherst Plant Biology Graduate Student Miriam Hernandez-Romero has received a 2018 ASPB Recognition Travel Award to attend attend the upcoming Plant Biology 2018 Symposium in Montréal. Plant Biology 2018 is a joint meeting of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), Canadian Society of Plant Biologists/Societe Canadienne de Biologie Vegetale, and the International Society of Photosynthesis Research at the Palais des congrès de Montréal. Plant Biology 2018 attendees will come from 36 countries and 46 states in the US.  Read More

Two members of the Biology faculty, Professor Tobias Baskin and Assistant Professor Lillian Fritz-Laylin, have been awarded separate Whitman Center fellowships to support research this summer at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) on Cape Cod. Read More

An international collaboration of plant researchers this week reports yet another newly discovered role for the versatile receptor kinase, FERONIA, in the model plant Arabidopsis. The researchers say it acts as a sensor in the plant cell wall to help maintain its integrity and protect the plant from environmental assaults. 

How cells sense their physical state and compensate for cell wall damage is poorly understood, say authors led by Alice Cheung at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and collaborator José Dinneny from the Carnegie Institute for Science and Stanford University. But their new analysis of plants exposed to salt stress offers the first experimental evidence and molecular mechanisms showing how FERONIA is essential for the cellular responses that ensure survival under high salinity.

Details are online now and will be in the March 5 issue of Current Biology.   Read more