I’m going to show my age here, but it is 30 years since I last built my own computer! What a change. The job then involved lots of razor sharp metal edges, drilling out dozens of holes, hundreds of soldered connections, not to say a particular memory of soldering up a 64-way ribbon cable only to […]

It’s now nearly mid-way between Plant and Animal Genome Conferences held each January in San Diego. This is an annual conference where you can pick up on trends in genomic research with an emphasis on crops and to a lesser extent farmed animals. For me, far more interesting than the headline topics of the Workshops […]

“Such studies taking these factors into account may eventually lead to our better, comprehensive understanding of the association between the” is a phrase that features in no less than 30 different papers indexed in Google Scholar . I was alerted to this particular shared  neologism by an article subtitled “An investigation into some scientific papers finds worrying irregularities”  in […]

Saffron, the stigma of Crocus sativus, is the highest priced agricultural product (often €/$25 or £15 per gram) and a good example of a profitable crop with sustainability, cultural and social values, and high labour demand. I have been discussing –omics studies of the crop – the DNA, RNA, metabolites and secondary products – at […]

The way that we can address questions in genome evolution and expression has changed enormously in the last five years. We can get huge amounts of DNA sequence for any species for a budget within that of most labs. As importantly perhaps, the web and PC-based analytical tools now enable researcher to do something with […]

Domestication of species is critical for our farming and own nutrition, as well as being important for retrospective studies of evolutionary genetics and future applications in animal and plant breeding. The genes involved in the first stages of domestication in plants are relatively clear: a single, tasty, energy-rich, product over-produced with a high proportion easily […]

AoBBlog is delighted to welcome two guest authors who are carrying out project work with Annals of Botany Editor Dr Karine Alix. Aurélien and Antoine introduce themselves below, and will be making posts in both English and French over the next months. While most words can be translated between the languages, I am always interested […]

DNA testing is an important part of our life now – as we have seen with proving that a skeleton in Leicester comes from the body of the last Plantagenet King Richard III, and not a mediaeval Monk, or with the implications of finding horse meat in a lot of beef products. I’ve just done an […]

Since every newspaper in the UK is featuring pages of pictures of the snow, I thought I would add some from the Botanic Gardens of the University of Leicester. After unseasonably warm, spring-like weather, the bulbs were growing and birds singing last week. Now an unusual 15cm/6″ of snow has fallen in 24 hours, and […]

Our videoblog discusses plants in the family Proteaceae, a well-known Southern hemisphere family with many beautiful and well-known representatives in Africa and Australia. The striking red flowers of the genus Leucospermum, from South Africa feature on the cover of the Annals of Botany for this year. Banksia is a well-known Australian genus, the bottle brush […]

I'm writing an AoBBlog post (or maybe posts) on ten plants that all botanists should know quite a lot about. Criteria for inclusion include importance in the environment, importance to people as food or culturally, scientific interest, global nature, and evolutionary position. What are your suggestions?