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Shade avoidance responses are well known to enhance individual plant fitness at high densities by positioning the photosynthesizing leaves away from the shade caused by neighbor plant leaves. However, in isogenic monocultures, such as most crop fields, all plants are … Continue reading
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Sara Buti succesfully defended her PhD thesis yesterday. It was a great event, with excellent questions from the committee (Jaume Martinez-Garcia, Roberta Croce, Guido van den Ackerveken, Kirsten ten Tusscher and Titti Mariani), great answers and discussions by Sara, and … Continue reading
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Our latest paper is now online, open access at Current Biology: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30340-9. The project started a couple of years ago when Scott Hayes, then still with Kerry Franklin at University of Bristol, reached out to me to write a research … Continue reading
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We are very happy to introduce two new PhD students in our team: Nicole Nieuwendijk (left) and Lisa Oskam (right), who will be working on Ronald’s Vici project. Also Kasper van Gelderen and Sara Buti will be on the Vici … Continue reading
Since a couple of years we have started to study molecular and physiological mechanisms that allow plants to suppress shade avoidance responses. We expect these to be prominent in in species that live in forest understories, since the tall trees … Continue reading
Our PhD students are organizing the European Plant Science Retreat here in Utrecht. We’re lucky, it’s fabulous sunny weather, Utrecht at its best. The organizers have done a fantastic job and invited amazing speakers, which even allowed me to catch up … Continue reading
Plant biologists are, or should be, used to diversity. Trees, algae, annual plants. Gymnosperms, Angiosperms, mosses. Not every question can be answered using just Arabidopsis as the model and we all like to think that our research may help improve … Continue reading
Chrysa Pantazopoulou successfully defended her thesis a couple of weeks ago. It deals with shade avoidance control, including last year’s PNAS paper, and ideas about implementing our knowledge in weed control. Congratulations to Chrysa for a wonderful public defense, and … Continue reading
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Interested in understanding how plants grow? Check out the latest two Focus Issues of Plant Physiology. The January issue is on Cellular Dynamics, the February issue on Energy: Light and Oxygen Dynamics. Combined they have provide excellent resources for the … Continue reading
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It is well-established now that phytochrome detection of high plant density signals reduces plant resistance against herbivores and pathogens. In a new Functional Structural Plant (FSP) modeling paper, Jorad de Vries (in the Jochem Evers group @ Wageningen University) et … Continue reading
Plant Photobiology 