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Night At The Conservatory

Night at the Conservatory Lecture Series

  • by Scott E Detrick
  • March 06, 2023
Join us at 6pm on the second Thursday for a plant related talk given from members of the conservatory community. FREE! All are welcome to attend. Snacks and drinks will be provided however space is going to be limited, so try and come early.  Conservatory will be open for viewing.
Katherine Esau

A Gift Grows On: The Legacy of Katherine Esau

  • by Trishna Sharma
  • February 07, 2023
In 1988, a 90-year-old alumna and former faculty member gave $648,000 to UC Davis to establish an endowment that would fund plant research fellowships in perpetuity. Still driving discovery today, her gift demonstrates the power of an endowment to benefit the world for generations.
Sunflowers

Circadian Clock Controls Sunflower Blooms, Optimizing for Pollinators

  • by Trishna Sharma
  • January 25, 2023
An internal circadian clock controls the distinctive concentric rings of flowering in sunflowers, maximizing visits from pollinators, a new study from plant biologists at the University of California, Davis, shows. The work was published Jan. 13 in eLife.
Rice Field

Rice Breeding Breakthrough to Feed Billions

  • by Trishna Sharma
  • January 17, 2023

An international team has succeeded in propagating a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95% efficiency. This could lower the cost of hybrid rice seed, making high-yielding, disease resistant rice strains available to low-income farmers worldwide. The work was published Dec. 27 in Nature Communications.

Sprouts

First Complete Structures of Plant Respiratory Proteins

  • by Trishna Sharma
  • January 12, 2023

Back-to-back papers in the Dec. 29 issue of Nature Plants report the first complete protein structures for plant respiratory supercomplex I+III₂. Obtaining these structures helps researchers understand basic plant biology, as well as stress responses and how biofuel crops might grow more rapidly.

Poplar Trees

Understanding Growth Regulation by Protein Degradation in Trees for Bioenergy

  • by Andy Fell
  • September 14, 2022

The U.S. Department of Energy is funding a project at the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences to study the function of genes that regulate growth and wood formation in poplar trees. The three-year, $2.5 million project is led by Nitzan Shabek, assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Biology together with Andrew Groover at the USDA Pacific Southwest Research Station in Davis and Justin Walley, Iowa State University.

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