Lockdown extended

As expected, the lockdown will continue until Friday, June 11th. No access to the lab until then.

Back in Lockdown – for the 4th time

Since Friday, May 28th, we are back in complete lockdown, with no access to the lab. Let’s see for how long we are going this time. Originally slated to only last until Friday, June 04th, it looks like it will go longer.

Chapter 5 of the Short History of Plant Science is published

The fifth chapter of the Short History of Plant Science is now published as a preprint via Zenodo. This chapter deals with plant light microscopy, and covers topics such as Robert Hooke coining the term ‘cell’ to describe ‘cells’ while imaging cork in the 17th century, the development of the Cell Theory by Schleiden and Schwann, the revolution that was brought upon all microscopists with the parallel development of the Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope and GFP as a protein tag, and finally the more recent developments such as Super-Resolution Microscopy, Vertical-Stage Microscopes or Light-Sheet Microscopes.

Chapter 5 is online here:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4682572

Two Summaries of the main events covered can be found here
https://twitter.com/somssichm/status/1386572229857607682
and here:
https://twitter.com/somssichm/status/1386579186945462277

And all chapters are on the main page of the Series here:
https://cellwallimmunity.science.unimelb.edu.au/#tab87

Jacob contributed to a paper on the structure of CESA3

Jacob has contributed to a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on the structure of CESA3 with its substrate:

Structure of Arabidopsis CESA3 catalytic domain with its substrate UDP-glucose provides insight into the mechanism of cellulose synthesis
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024015118

New paper in Plant & Cell Physiology

Our work with Dmitry Suslov from Saint Petersburg State University is finally published in Plant & Cell Physiology. Have a look at:

‘Brassinosteroids Influence Arabidopsis Hypocotyl Graviresponses through Changes in Mannans and Cellulose’

https://doi.org/10.1093/pcp/pcab024

Liu contributed to a Spotlight Article for Molecular Plant

Liu has contributed to a Spotlight article for Molecular Plant, discussing recent findings by Yan et al. (2020), that pectins, more precisely β-1,4-galactans of rhamnogalacturonan I (RGI), play an important role in the plant’s salt stress response.

Salt with a sweet-tooth: Galactan synthesis impacts salt tolerance in Arabidopsis
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molp.2021.01.011

Slowly getting back to work

Restrictions have been slowly lifted over the past three weeks, and we are a allowed to work more again. Hopefully, things will go back to semi-normal in January.

Still no change to working hours…

Victoria is opening up after I-don’t-remember-how-many-weeks-of-lockdown, but we here at the Plant Sciences division are still not allowed to increase our working hours.

Lockdown extended until October 26th

So the Corona-Lockdown has been extended until October 26th. At that point it will be seven months that we have not been allowed to do anything but essential tasks (keeping plant lines alive, etc.).

A pretty bad year for everybody here at BioSciences UniMelb.

Back in Lockdown

Well, that didn’t last long. We are back in lockdown with stage 4 restriction imposed in Melbourne.