The Research

The biochemist Professor Dr. Dorothee Staiger from Bielefeld University has been studying the biological clock in plants for twenty years. Credit: research_tv   The Americans Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for their research on the biological clock. They discovered the molecular mechanisms controlling biological rhythms. A new 'research_tv' report describes how scientists at Bielefeld are also advancing research on the biological clock. The biochemist Professor Dr. Dorothee Staiger from Bielefeld University explains what the three Nobel Prize winners have achieved and reports on the discoveries her research team has made together with collaborators. 'A Nobel Prize for the biological clock has long been overdue,' says Dorothee Staiger. What is so remarkable is that the prize has been granted to basic research - that is, to studies on fundamental concepts in nature. Whereas the...

Catalog of candidate genes involved in plant-microbe relationships Published Dec. 18, 2017 in Nature Genetics, a team led by researchers at Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) have exploited a catalog of bacterial genomes to identify and characterize candidate genes that aid bacteria in adapting to plant environments, specifically genes involved in bacterial root colonization. This image depicts a phylogenetic tree of over 3,800 high quality and non-redundant bacterial genomes. Outer ring denotes the taxonomic group, central ring denotes the isolation source, and inner ring denotes the root-associated genomes within plant-associated genomes. Taxon names are color-coded based on phylum: green - Proteobacteria, red - Firmicutes, blue -Bacteroidetes, purple - Actinobacteria. Credit: Asaf Levy, JGI As the global population rises, estimated to hit nearly 10 billion by 2050, so does the need to ...