text: Stanford, CA— How do green algae grow so quickly? Two new collaborations offer insight into how these organisms siphon carbon dioxide from the air for use in photosynthesis, a key factor...
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  What makes red algae so different and why should we care?
  Palo Alto, CA— The red algae called Porphyra and its ancestors have thrived for millions of years in the harsh habitat of the intertidal zone—exposed to fluctuating temperatures, high UV...
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  Algae: the final frontier
  Palo Alto, CA— Algae dominate the oceans that cover nearly three-quarters of our planet, and produce half of the oxygen that we breathe. And yet fewer than 10 percent of the algae have been...
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  Carnegie’s Cesar-Cuevas Velazquez Announced Pew Latin American Fellow
  Pew announced the 2017 classes of biomedical scholars, Latin American fellows, and Pew-Stewart Scholars for Cancer Research today. Cesar-Cuevas Velazquez of the Department of...
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  Revealed: New step in plant mastermind hormone’s pathway
  Stanford, CA—Plants are stationary. This means that the way they grow must be highly internally regulated to use the surrounding resources in the most-advantageous way possible. Just imagine if...
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  Plant Biology’s Jia-Ying Zhu Receives Postdoctoral Innovation and Excellence (PIE) Award
  Washington, D.C.--Plant Biology postdoctoral research associate since 2012, Jia-Ying Zhu was awarded the sixth PIE award for her creativity, productivity, being a great team player in research,...
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  How improved valves let grasses “breathe,” cope with climate change
  Palo Alto, CA—New work from a joint team of plant biologists and ecologists from Carnegie and Stanford University has uncovered the factor behind an important innovation that makes grasses...
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  Digital genome
  Revolutionary progress in understanding plant biology is being driven through advances in DNA sequencing technology. Carnegie plant scientists have played a key role in the sequencing and genome annotation efforts of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the soil alga ...
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  Meet Carnegie Scientists
  David Ehrhardt
  Plants are not as static as you think. David Ehrhardt combines confocal microscopy with novel visualization methods to see the three-dimensional movement within live plant cells to reveal the other-worldly cell choreography that makes up plant tissues. These methods allow his group to explore...
  Meet this Scientist
  Arthur Grossman
  Arthur Grossman believes that the future of plant science depends on research that spans ecology, physiology, molecular biology and genomics. As such, work in his lab has been extremely diverse. He identifies new functions associated with photosynthetic processes, the mechanisms of coral bleaching...
  Meet this Scientist
  Devaki Bhaya
  Devaki Bhaya wants to understand how environmental stressors, such as light, nutrients, and viral attacks are sensed by and affect photosynthetic microorganisms. She is also interested in understanding the mechanisms behind microorganism movements, and how individuals in groups communicate, evolve...
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  Water found to provide blueprints for root architecture
  AudioStanford, CA—Soil is a microscopic maze of nooks and crannies that hosts a wide array of life. Plants explore this environment by developing a complex branched network of roots that tap into...
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  MAD: Scientists shed light on braking mechanisms in cellular signaling
  AudioStanford, CA— A team of researchers studying a flowering plant has zeroed in on the way cells manage external signals about prevailing conditions, a capability that is essential for cells to...
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  Nectar: A sweet reward from plants to attract pollinators
  AudioStanford, CA— Evolution is based on diversity, and sexual reproduction is key to creating a diverse population that secures competitiveness in nature. Plants had to solve a problem: they needed...
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  Carnegie-led initiative receives major DOE biofuels research grant
  Carnegie plant biologists Sue Rhee and David Ehrhardt will lead one of 25 teams awarded a total of $64 million this week by the U.S. Department of Energy to pursue genomic research of...
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  The Washington Post covers the quest for the perfect tomato
  Washington Post gardening columnist, Adrian Higgins, writes about the quest for the perfect tomato and this month's Capital Science Evening speaker, Harry Klee of the University of...
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  New technique will accelerate genetic characterization of photosynthesis
  AudioStanford, CA— Photosynthesis provides fixed carbon and energy for nearly all life on Earth, yet many aspects of this fascinating process remain mysterious. For example, little is known about how...
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  Unraveling a mystery of dinoflagellate genomic architecture
  May 3, 2021
  A plant’s nutrient-sensing abilities can modulate its response to environmental stress
  February 11, 2021
  Engineering light availability for crop production—a solution for coming challenges?
  February 1, 2021
  Can we harness a plant’s ability to synthesize medicinal compounds?
  November 24, 2020
  Unraveling a mystery of dinoflagellate genomic architecture
  May 3, 2021
  Palo Alto, CA—New work from a Stanford University-led team of researchers including Carnegie’s Arthur Grossman and Tingting Xiang unravels a longstanding mystery about the relationship between form and function in the genetic material of a diverse group of algae called dinoflagellates.
  Their findings, published in Nature Genetics, have implications for understanding genomic organizational principles of all organisms.
  Dinoflagellates include more than 2,000 species of marine and freshwater plankton, many of which are photosynthetic, and some of which also ingest other organisms for food. They play a wide variety of roles in various ecosystems, including extreme
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  A plant’s nutrient-sensing abilities can modulate its response to environmental stress
  February 11, 2021
  Palo Alto, CA— Understanding how plants respond to stressful environmental conditions is crucial to developing effective strategies for protecting important agricultural crops from a changing climate. New research led by Carnegie’s Zhiyong Wang, Shouling Xu, and Yang Bi reveals an important process by which plants switch between amplified and dampened stress responses. Their work is published by Nature Communications.
  To survive in a changing environment, plants must choose between different response strategies, which are based on both external environmental factors and internal nutritional and energy demands. For example, a plant might either delay or accelerate its
  Read Full Story
  Engineering light availability for crop production—a solution for coming challenges?
  February 1, 2021
  Palo Alto, CA— What if we could increase a plant’s productivity by modifying the light to which it is exposed? This could increase the yield of important food and biofuel crops and also combat climate change by sequestering atmospheric carbon.
  In a recent perspective piece in Energy and Environmental Science, Carnegie’s Arthur Grossman and Petra Redekop joined colleagues from Stanford University—Larissa Kunz, Matteo Cargnello, and Arun Majumdar—and University of Illinois Urbana Champaign’s Donald Ort to argue that specially engineered lighting modifications through the use of photoluminescent material could drive a next big leap in the green
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  Can we harness a plant’s ability to synthesize medicinal compounds?
  November 24, 2020
  Palo Alto, CA— Anthraquinones are a class of naturally occurring compounds prized for their medicinal properties, as well as for other applications, including ecologically friendly dyes. Despite wide interest, the mechanism by which plants produce them has remained shrouded in mystery until now.
  New work from an international team of scientists including Carnegie’s Sue Rhee reveals a gene responsible for anthraquinone synthesis in plants. Their findings could help scientists cultivate a plant-based mechanism for harvesting these useful compounds in bulk quantities.
  “Senna tora is a legume with anthraquinone-based medicinal properties that have long
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  Digital genome
  Digital genome
  Revolutionary progress in understanding plant biology is being driven through advances in DNA sequencing technology. Carnegie plant scientists have played a key role in the sequencing and genome annotation efforts of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the soil alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Now that many genomes from algae to mosses and trees are publicly available, this information can be mined using bioinformatics to build models to understand gene function and ultimately for designing plants for a wide spectrum of applications.
  Carnegie researchers have pioneered a genome-wide gene association network Aranet that can assign functions
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  Zhiyong Wang - Acting Director
  Sue Rhee
  David Ehrhardt
  Arthur Grossman
  Zhiyong Wang - Acting Director
  Zhiyong Wang was appointed acting director of Department of Plant Biology in 2018.
  Wang’s research aims to understand how plant growth is controlled by environmental and endogenous signals. Being sessile, plants respond environmental changes by altering their growth behavior. As such, plants display high developmental plasticity and their growth is highly sensitive to environmental conditions. Plants have evolved many hormones that function as growth regulators, and growth is also responsive to the availability of nutrients and energy (photosynthates).
  To understand how plant cells perceive and transduce various regulatory signals, and how combinations of complex
  Meet this Scientist
  Sue Rhee
  Plants are essential to life on Earth and provide us with food, fuel, clothing, and shelter. Despite all this, we know very little about how they do what they do. Even for the best-studied species, such as Arabidopsis thaliana --a wild mustard studied in the lab--we know about less than 20% of what its genes do and how or why they do it. And understanding this evolution can help develop new crop strains to adapt to climate change.
  Sue Rhee wants to uncover the molecular mechanisms underlying adaptive traits in plants to understand how these traits evolved. A bottleneck has been the limited understanding of the functions of most plant genes. Rhee’s group is
  Meet this Scientist
  David Ehrhardt
  Plants are not as static as you think. David Ehrhardt combines confocal microscopy with novel visualization methods to see the three-dimensional movement within live plant cells to reveal the other-worldly cell choreography that makes up plant tissues. These methods allow his group to explore cell-signaling and cell-organizational events as they unfold.
  These methods allow his lab to investigate plant cell development and structure and molecular genetics to understand the organization and dynamic behaviors of molecules and organelles. The group tackles how cells generate asymmetries and specific shapes. A current focus is how the cortical microtubule cytoskeleton— an
  Meet this Scientist
  Arthur Grossman
  Arthur Grossman believes that the future of plant science depends on research that spans ecology, physiology, molecular biology and genomics. As such, work in his lab has been extremely diverse. He identifies new functions associated with photosynthetic processes, the mechanisms of coral bleaching and the impact of temperature and light on the bleaching process.
  He also has extensively studied the blue-green algae Chlamydomonas genome and is establishing methods for examining the set of RNA molecules and the function of proteins involved in their photosynthesis and acclimation. He also studies the regulation of sulfur metabolism in green algae and plants.
  Grossman
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