Pat Heslop-Harrison (with collaborators listed below) examines why it's not just humans that need better crops.

Have we banished the hungry gap? Pat Heslop-Harrison has been talking to BBC Radio Leicester.

Why do we collect plants? Pat Heslop-Harrison finds out with the BBC television show Countryfile.

What does it mean to work towards Sustainable Development? Pat Heslop-Harrison, editor of Annals of Botany, has been discussing the issue in Brussels with European stakeholders.

Pat raised an interesting point while he was at the International Botanical Congress in Shenzhen. Should you tweet whole posters from a conference? I think I also saw a passive-aggressive complaint about people photographing slides. My view is that if you ever see a poster of mine at a conference, then I’d be delighted if […]

Sometimes confusing & contradictory, but also energetic & innovative. Pat Heslop-Harrison looks for the key themes from the International Botanical Congress.

For International Women's Day, we are celebrating the work and achievements of Professor Winifred Pennington FRS. You can download a free poster of her life at the end of this article.

Name: Maize or Corn Scientific name: Zea mays Known for: Food of the Gods (or Blasphemy against them when in Corn Dogs) Record broken: Yields I expect most of you have limited direct experience with many of our other plant record winners this week. But you almost certainly have personal experience with my choice already […]

Almost all the milk we drink will come from cows whose father’s sperm was frozen. It is quite likely that their father himself was an embryo transfer bull, who started ‘life’ in frozen in liquid nitrogen, and many of the elite dairy cows will be ET cows with frozen and thawed embryos implanted into a […]

I had started writing about risk assessment for AoBBlog a few weeks ago, but only this week I’ve met a critical risk assessment in practice. I’m writing this when I should be on a flight to Africa: why am I not on that flight? Foreign Office travel advice changed to “avoid all but essential travel” […]

As the wine harvest reaches its peak in the Northern Hemisphere, what are the top three grapes? Interestingly, despite the volume of wine produced globally, and the long-lived plantations / vineyards, there have been changes this millennium, with red grapes overtaking the white varieties. According to Adelaide University, the top grapes are the reds Cabernet […]

The European Cytogenetics Conference, this year #ECA2015 in Strasbourg, is a terrific meeting to hear the latest on chromosome research, with a strong focus on human research but lots that is important for plant and animal cytogenetics. A key message this year is the ubiquity and importance of copy number variation – CNV – of […]