If you put a cutting of, say, a geranium or an inchplant, into a cup of water, you can see tender new roots reaching out within a few days. Soon, a tiny new leaf pokes out of the stem. What you’re seeing is the result of cell division – without which, nothing grows.
Botanist Daniel Potter is the new chair of the Department of Plant Sciences, overseeing graduate and undergraduate programming, 60 faculty members, several emeriti professors and many greenhouses, labs and teaching facilities.
Room 1026 in the Katherine Esau Sciences Laboratory Building is not your ordinary space. It’s home to the UC Davis Center for Plant Diversity Herbarium and a world of 300,000 preserved plants, including lichens, algae, mosses and other specimens.
This year, we are excited for the 2024 UC Davis Plant Sciences Symposium to represent work across the plant sciences with the theme, “Plant diversity from genes to ecosystems.”
How can we really know what’s going on with the plants in fields, orchards and pastures? Using massive amounts of information gathered from agricultural lands, scientists have developed models that simulate how plants absorb light, take in and release gases, use water, grow and produce food.
UC Davis plant sciences lecturer Muhammad Marrush is remembered for nearly 40 years of dedication. Born in Lebanon, he contributed to UC Davis and loved cultivating plants. The celebration of life is on Jan. 13 at the Marrush residence.
These greenhouses may look purple: In some cases, controlled, indoor agriculture has the lettuce growing out of panels hung vertically and illuminated with red and blue LED lights, instead of stretching out on horizontal tables under sunlit glass or plastic. To share the latest findings in growing food and medicine in indoor vertical and greenhouse environments, scientists from around the United States and Canada gathered recently at UC Davis, part of a working group organized through the United States Department of Agriculture.
Tree nut experts from around the world are gathering at the UC Davis Convention Center this week to discuss the challenges faced by the people growing and processing almonds and pistachios. Researchers are outlining possible solutions and exchanging ideas for how to combat problems of water scarcity, increasingly saline water and soils, rising wintertime temperatures and new pests that come with the changing conditions.
Dwarfing genes in cereal crops made the Green Revolution of the 1960s possible, but they have limitations. Scientists at UC Davis have discovered a gene that can overcome some of those limitations in wheat by controlling plant height, while boosting yield in fields where water is less plentiful. Their discovery was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For the first time, a biophysical model has been created to describe an essential, life-giving process among plants: cell division through the building of a wall that divides the original cell into two daughter cells, called cytokinesis.
