Welcome to Plant Energy Biology

The ARC Centre for Excellence in Plant Energy Biology (PEB) will host five new "Super Science Fellows" under the Australian Government's $27.2 million Super Science Fellowships scheme, aimed at attracting the world's best early career researchers.

The University of Western Australia was awarded three fellowships in biotechnology. The fellows, who will be based at PEB, will investigate the interaction between rice plants and phosphate fertilisers. Crop plants require the addition of phosphate fertilisers in nutrient poor Australian soils. All types of phosphates are not equal, and it is estimated that billions of dollars worth of phosphate from previous fertiliser applications lie in our soils in forms unusable to plants. Due to the fact that phosphate deposits worldwide are dwindling, it is critical that we find out how to breed crop plants that use these limited supplies more efficiently.

• For the full news story click here
• UWA Media Release

Centre contributes to paper published in proceedings of the national academy of sciences

A paper documenting the results of years of research by scientists in UWA's Faculty of Life and Physical Sciences in collaboration with Kings Park and Botanic Garden has been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA.

The results now published in the March 30th issue describes a chemical 'smoke signal' that enables seeds and seedlings to better 'see' the light and to adapt their growth to new conditions, according to researchers at The University of Western Australia.

UWA plant biologist Dr David Nelson who discovered the response to light said: "We found that seedlings exposed to karrikins become more responsive to light. They shorten their stem and expand their first leaves to produce a stockier seedling that is adapted to the exposed conditions left by fire."

CIBER research published in Science!

Seminal fluid from one male can damage the sperm of other males in insect species where females mate with several males but female secretions seem to inhibit this effect. Research conducted at the University of Western Australia, the University of Copenhagen and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) investigated the effects of the seminal fluid of two species of bees - the multiple-mating honeybee and the single-mating bumble bee - and three species of Panamanian leaf-cutting ants, of which two have queens that mate multiply.

The results now published in the March 19th issue of Science indicate that only the seminal fluid of the multiple-mating species appears to have the capacity to damage the sperm of competitors. In the single-mating bumblebees, the male inserts a 'plug' into the female once she is mated which seems to prevent her re-mating, so ejaculates from different males never get into contact with each other and appear not to have evolved a system of sperm warfare.