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While COVID19 measures closed down our lab, a major renovation of our Phytotron (Plant Growth Facility) was planned. Even though access to all of our facilities is still strictly limited by ongoing COVID19 measures, we are fortunate to start using … Continue reading →

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Wouldn’t it be great to meet all these wonderful people in the lab in real life again! We will continue to meet online for quite some time still, but the good news is that lab life is slowly starting up … Continue reading →

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Just like most other labs, we had to close our lab activities by and large. We’re just collecting useful lab materials and donate these to the university hospital in these tense times, just like most other life science groups do. … Continue reading →

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Wednesday 26 February at 2 PM, Jacob Weiner (University of Copenhagen) will give a seminar at Utrecht University. Jacob is an amazing speaker, excellent (agro-)ecologist and full of inspiring ideas on how modulation of shade avoidance in crops can help … Continue reading →

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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 →