Plant Photobiology

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 →

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Last week we had an excellent edition of the International Symposium of Plant Photobiology in Matsue, Japan. Very exciting new work was presented by many different speakers and we will be witnessing several awesome papers published this year. In addition, … Continue reading →

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Light is the plant’s source of energy, harnessed in the process of photosynthesis. Plants show spectacular plasticity to ensure light capture even when grown in very dense stands where shading by neighbors is a serious threat. Responses to grow towards … Continue reading →

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Computational models are a fantastic tool that we are adding to our research these days. Franca Bongers, in a collaboration between Jochem Evers at Wageningen University and ourselves,  built an Arabidopsis Functional Structural Plant (FSP) model in which growth of … Continue reading →

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As of 1 November, Valérie Hoogers has joined our team as a PhD student. She will be working on a project that is funded by the Building Blocks of Life scheme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific research (NWO). The project is … Continue reading →