Plant Science Stories
Moises Exposito-Alonso
Carnegie's Exposito-Alonso selected for Forbes’ “Under 30” list
Washington, DC— Carnegie evolutionary geneticist Moises Exposito-Alonso was named a member of the 2020 class of Forbes’...
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Caltech logo
Expanded Pasadena presence deepens Carnegie's relationship with Caltech
The Carnegie Institution for Science is consolidating our California research departments into an expanded presence in Pasadena. With this move, we are building on our existing relationship with...
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Moises Exposito-Alonso
Exposito-Alonso recognized for early career excellence by American Society of Naturalists
Palo Alto, CA— Carnegie’s Moises Exposito-Alonso is one of four recipients of the American Society of Naturalists’ Jasper Loftus-Hills Young Investigator Award in recognition of...
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A fluorescence image of the sea anemone Exaiptasia, courtesy of Tingting Xiang
How do corals make the most of their symbiotic algae?
Stanford, CA— Corals depend on their symbiotic relationships with the algae that they host. But how do they keep algal population growth in check? The answer to this fundamental question could...
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Researchers in Tübingen courtesy of Moises Exposito-Alonso.
Predicting the mutations plants need to survive climate change
Palo Alto, CA— Plant genetic diversity in Central Europe could collapse due to temperature extremes and drought brought on by climate change, according to a new paper in Nature led by Moises...
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Octopus Spring in Yellowstone National Park courtesy of Devaki Bhaya
Carnegie researchers receive joint U.K.-U.S. grant to study hot spring microbes
Palo Alto, CA— Carnegie plant scientists Devaki Bhaya and Arthur Grossman received a nearly $2 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.K. Biotechnology and Biological...
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Public domain image of a field of sorghum.
Carnegie-led initiative receives major DOE biofuels research grant
Palo Alto, CA— Carnegie plant biologists Sue Rhee and David Ehrhardt will lead one of 25 teams awarded a total of $64 million this week by the...
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Winslow Briggs by Robin Kempster, courtesy Carnegie Institution for Science.
New award will honor Winslow Briggs’ legacy of mentorship
Washington, DC—The American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) will name a mentorship award in honor of legendary Carnegie plant scientist Winslow Briggs, who died in February.  The ASPB...
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Digital genome
Revolutionary progress in understanding plant biology is being driven through advances in DNA sequencing technology. Carnegie plant scientists have played a key role in the sequencing and genome annotation efforts of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the soil alga ...
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Meet Carnegie Scientists
David Ehrhardt
Plants are not as static as you think. David Ehrhardt combines confocal microscopy with novel visualization methods to see the three-dimensional movement  within live plant cells to reveal the other-worldly cell choreography that makes up plant tissues. These methods allow his group to explore...
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Zhiyong Wang - Acting Director
Zhiyong Wang was appointed acting director of Department of Plant Biology in 2018. Wang’s research aims to understand how plant growth is controlled by environmental and endogenous signals. Being sessile, plants respond environmental changes by altering their growth behavior. As such, plants...
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Matthew Evans
Matthew Evans wants to provide new tools for plant scientists to engineer better seeds for human needs. He focuses on one of the two phases to their life cycle. In the first phase, the sporophyte is the diploid generation—that is with two similar sets of chromosomes--that undergoes meiosis to...
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How corn’s ancient ancestor swipes left on crossbreeding
Determining how one species becomes distinct from another has been a subject of fascination dating back to Charles Darwin. New research led by Carnegie’s Matthew Evans and published in ...
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Investigating coral and algal “matchmaking” at the cellular level
What factors govern algae’s success as “tenants” of their coral hosts both under optimal conditions and when oceanic temperatures rise? A Victoria University of Wellington-led team...
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Have you had your cereal today?
Stanford, CA—Cereals are grasses that produce grains, the bulk of our food supply. Carnegie’s Plant Biology Department is releasing genome-wide metabolic complements of several cereals including rice...
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Moises Exposito-Alonso
Carnegie's Exposito-Alonso selected for Forbes’ “Under 30” list
March 18, 2020

Washington, DC— Carnegie evolutionary geneticist Moises Exposito-Alonso was named a member of the 2020 class of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Europe list in science and healthcare. 

He was recognized for his lab’s pioneering use of genomic techniques to understand how plant species will evolve and keep pace with a changing climate. 

Out of the thousands of nominees, the 30 finalists in each of the 10 categories comprise “the world’s most impactful community of young entrepreneurs and game-changers,” said the publication in announcing his selection.  

“Growing up in southern Spain, I saw how Mediterranean

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Caltech logo
Expanded Pasadena presence deepens Carnegie's relationship with Caltech
March 17, 2020

The Carnegie Institution for Science is consolidating our California research departments into an expanded presence in Pasadena. With this move, we are building on our existing relationship with Caltech, with a goal of broadening our historic collaborations in astronomy and astrophysics and pursuing new opportunities in ecology and plant biology that will support the global fight against climate change.

This plan, which affects our research operations in Pasadena and Palo Alto, reflects Carnegie’s ongoing efforts to extend our leadership in space, Earth, and life sciences and to enhance our ability to explore new frontiers.

In selecting our Pasadena location, we

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Moises Exposito-Alonso
Exposito-Alonso recognized for early career excellence by American Society of Naturalists
February 28, 2020

Palo Alto, CA— Carnegie’s Moises Exposito-Alonso is one of four recipients of the American Society of Naturalists’ Jasper Loftus-Hills Young Investigator Award in recognition of “outstanding and promising work” by individuals who are within three years of completing their Ph.D or in their final year of graduate school.

Exposito-Alonso is an evolutionary geneticist who joined Carnegie last September as a staff associate, a prestigious position designed for early career scientists who are ready to independently deploy creative approaches to challenging research projects. 

His lab is pioneering the use of genomics to ask whether species will

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A fluorescence image of the sea anemone Exaiptasia, courtesy of Tingting Xiang
How do corals make the most of their symbiotic algae?
January 8, 2020

Stanford, CA— Corals depend on their symbiotic relationships with the algae that they host. But how do they keep algal population growth in check? The answer to this fundamental question could help reefs survive in a changing climate.

New work published in Nature Communications by a team including Carnegie’s Tingting Xiang, Sophie Clowez, Rick Kim, and Arthur Grossman indicates how sea anemones, which are closely related to coral, control the size of the algal populations that reside within their tissue.  

Like corals, anemones host photosynthetic algae, which can convert the Sun’s energy into chemical energy. An alga shares some of the sugars

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Digital genome

Revolutionary progress in understanding plant biology is being driven through advances in DNA sequencing technology. Carnegie plant scientists have played a key role in the sequencing and genome annotation efforts of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the soil alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Now that many genomes from algae to mosses and trees are publicly available, this information can be mined using bioinformatics to build models to understand gene function and ultimately for designing plants for a wide spectrum of applications.

 Carnegie researchers have pioneered a genome-wide gene association network Aranet that can assign functions

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Arthur Grossman

Arthur Grossman believes that the future of plant science depends on research that spans ecology, physiology, molecular biology and genomics. As such, work in his lab has been extremely diverse. He identifies new functions associated with photosynthetic processes, the mechanisms of coral bleaching and the impact of temperature and light on the bleaching process.

He also has extensively studied the blue-green algae Chlamydomonas genome and is establishing methods for examining the set of RNA molecules and the function of proteins involved in their photosynthesis and acclimation. He also studies the regulation of sulfur metabolism in green algae and plants.  

Grossman

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Moises Exposito-Alonso

Evolutionary geneticist Moises Exposito-Alonso joined the Department of Plant Biology as a staff associate in September 2019. He investigates whether and how plants will evolve to keep pace with climate change by conducting large-scale ecological and genome sequencing experiments. He also develops computational methods to derive fundamental principles of evolution, such as how fast natural populations acquire new mutations and how past climates shaped continental-scale biodiversity patterns. His goal is to use these first principles and computational approaches to forecast evolutionary outcomes of populations under climate change to anticipate potential future

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Zhiyong Wang - Acting Director

Zhiyong Wang was appointed acting director of Department of Plant Biology in 2018.

Wang’s research aims to understand how plant growth is controlled by environmental and endogenous signals. Being sessile, plants respond environmental changes by altering their growth behavior. As such, plants display high developmental plasticity and their growth is highly sensitive to environmental conditions. Plants have evolved many hormones that function as growth regulators, and growth is also responsive to the availability of nutrients and energy (photosynthates).

To understand how plant cells perceive and transduce various regulatory signals, and how combinations of complex

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David Ehrhardt

Plants are not as static as you think. David Ehrhardt combines confocal microscopy with novel visualization methods to see the three-dimensional movement  within live plant cells to reveal the other-worldly cell choreography that makes up plant tissues. These methods allow his group to explore cell-signaling and cell-organizational events as they unfold.

These methods allow his lab to investigate plant cell development and structure and molecular genetics to understand the organization and dynamic behaviors of molecules and organelles. The group tackles how cells generate asymmetries and specific shapes. A current focus is how the cortical microtubule cytoskeleton— an

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