ARC Future Fellowship 2013

Matt is delighted with having been awarded a prestigious ARC Future Fellowship. His four year fellowship will fund the lab to study the mechanisms of chloride transport in plants, particularly its role in the salinity tolerance of crop plants and how it interacts with nitrate transport pathways to define efficiency in nitrogen uptake. Read more here... 

For the stats behind the scheme, see here. As always, very tough competition this year.

PCP lab @ COMBIO 2013

Sunita Ramesh, postdoc in the lab, has been invited to speak at COMBIO in Perth in the nutrient transport session.

PCP lab @ ICAR 2013, Sydney

Matt has been invited to speak in the abiotic stress session at the International Conference on Arabidopsis Research to be held in June in Sydney.

PCP lab @ IWPMB

A strong attendance from the PCP lab at one of our major conferences. Now in its sixteenth installment the International Workshop in Plant Membrane Biology will be held in Japan in late March 2013.

Sam Henderson, Jiaen Qiu and Bo Xu will be presenting posters, and Sunita Ramesh is giving a talk and a poster.

Matt is chairing a workshop session and talking.

Thanks to the GWRDC for supporting Sam's travel, and the GRDC and IWPMB for supporting Jiaen and Weasley's trip.

Hydroponics made easy

Our protocol paper outlining how to make an adaptable and versatile hydroponics system useful for many downstream assays has just been published online at Plant Methods, http://www.plantmethods.com/content/9/1/4 . We designed it for use with microeclectrode techniques and the LiCOR whole plant chamber for photosytnthesis measurements but it is very useful for any kind of physiological or molecular assay as the whole shoot and root can be accessed at any stage.

The real advantage of this particular technique is the ease of handling the plants throughout the growth, and the compatibility with many physiological assays. The paper contains many tips and tricks for getting good plant growth in the lab in general, including solution design and macros for measuring growth from images of the plants. The technique is useful for other plants too.

In the first week of being online the paper was viewed over 1000 times and is currently ranked second in terms of impact as measured by altmetrics for all Plant Methods papers, first for papers of a similar age. 

Here is a video that accompanies the paper, outlining the technique.