Transgene and Stress

The Cornell biologists showed stress tolerance by introducing the genes for trehalose synthesis into Indica rice varieties, which represent 80 percent of rice grown worldwide and include the widely eaten basmati rice. But the same strategy, they note, should also work in Japonica rice varieties, as well as in a range of other crops, including corn, wheat, millet, soybeans and sugar cane.

The researchers plan to report on their claims of increased food productivity from the resulting transgenic rice plants in a subsequent article. They say the trehalose gene technology will be placed in the public domain -- instead of being sold exclusively to commercial seed companies -- so that improved crop varieties can be cultivated in resource-poor parts of the world where the need is greatest.

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articles in chromium stress in plants

Impact Factors: What is it doing to science

We are witnessing an exponential growth of scientific literature in recent times. “Documentary chaos” is what Samuel C. Bradford, the former librarian of the Science Museum in London said is happening in the field of scientific literature, referring to its exponential growth. But the assessment of scientific quality is a very difficult task. The general trend was to use paper counts, importance of the journal etc. But in the past three decades Impact factors and citation indices are being used at the international level.
So what is impact factor?
The impact factor for a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current citations to articles published in that journal in the two previous years by the total number of articles published in the journal in the two previous years.
Impact factors judges the journal more effectively than the contributor or author but it is also wrong to say that scientific content has a secondary role to play; in fact it is the classical chicken or the egg story. An author selects high impact journal for his/her contribution and in turn the contribution is what increases the impact factor of the journal - a vicious circle of sorts. Journals have reputation, but their stature is only derived from the usefulness of the articles they publish. Evaluation of journals is a formidable but indispensable task considering the wide range of choices available, but again arbitrary evaluation of scientists based on the prestige of journals is moot point.

Plants

Plants constitute over 90% of the worlds's present and past biomass. Simply in terms of their bulk, whatever we learn about plants has the potential to tip the balance in any debate concerning the frequency of occurrence of a biological phenomenon. From the archaic algae to the most derived and evolved multicellular terrestrial plants, from the spectral properties of the light-harvesting pigments in the chloroplast to the stacking of leaves in the tree canopy, we are persistently drawn to the conclusion that behaviour of plants is in large part responsive to and intimately connected with the way the physical environment operates and is constructed. From their shape and size, we can reconstruct much of the ontogeny and development of its species, we can determine the potential for long distance dispersal and reproductive biology of species. Finally, throughout their billon-year history, we can infer a metabolic dependency of plants' vegetative growth and survival on the availability of light, water, minerals and space.
Nowhere else in biology than in plants do we find such convincing evidence that physical laws and processes link form and function and thus have confined the scope of organic expression within the boundaries that have never been breached. The task of the plant physiologist thus is to identify theses limitations and, at a finer level of analysis, demonstrate how physical principles have demonstrably influenced the morphological, anatomical, physiological and biochemical directions taken by individual plant lineages during the course of their evolution