Sensory and Physiological Ecology of Plants
Decoding the acquisition and use of information by wild and cultivated plant species
A big breakthrough! It all looks like the elusive UV-B photoreceptor has been at last identified. New evidence by Gareth Jenkins’ and Roman Ulm’s labs provides clear support for the hypothesis that the UVR8 protein is an UV-B photoreceptor.
The paper is at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6025/103.full.pdf
A very interesting read. Enjoy!
I just installed this program, and did a test run. Looks great for beta software. Replaces the whole R GUI. I am especially interested in Sweave support that is rather flaky in Tinn-R or requires a lot of setting changes in WinEdt. I will write again after some more testing. It is available for download at http://rstudio.org/ where there is also some documentation.
Lasse Ylianttila has now developed an stray light correction algorithm for our Ocean Optics Maya 2000 Pro, and done the necessary calibrations and slit function measurements with different lasers. Developing an stray light correction for the Maya was more complex as, unexpectedly, this top-of-the-range model behaved worse with respect to stray light than the cheaper and older Ocean Optics S2000. We are still waiting for the Bentham cosine diffuser to be delivered, but meanwhile Lasse has lent us an Ocean Optics diffusser. The spectral irradiance calibration will need to be repeated when we get our own diffuser.
Matt, Luis, Lasse Ylianttila and myself participated in this meeting. All of us gave talks, and Lasse and myself taught at the worshop for ESRs on the day after the conference ended. The management committee (MC) meeting was on Monday. I took over from Lars Olof Björn the coordination of TG 1 “UV technology”. Lars Olof stepped down as leader for personal reasons. Lars Olof will replace me as assistant leader. Because I am now leader of TG 1, I stepped down as leader of working group 3 (WG3) and will be replaced by Riitta Julkunen-Titto.
There were about 100 participants in the conference (7 or 8 from Finland), including many of the most prominent researchers working on the effects of UV on plants. We made many contacts and had very interesting discussions. From the data presented in several talks, it is now clear that UVR8 is almost for sure the UV-B photoreceptor in plants.
In the conference Lasse talked about the calibrations and stray light corrections needed to take UV measurements with array spectrometers. He presented data from STUK’s Ocean Optics S2000 and our Ocean Optics Maya 2000 Pro. Matt presented his data on Nothofagus (both from his experiments in Tierra del Fuego and in Viikki). Luis presented some results on epidermal transmittance measured in Arabidopsis with our Dualex 3 FLAV. I presented our work on action spectra, from Titta’s, Luis’s and Sari’s experiments.
In the workshop Lasse gave a lecture on the pitfalls that one can run into when measuring UV-B. I gave a lecture on biological spectral weighting functions, biologically effective doses, and how to compare doses of UV from lamps and the sun. For the workshop practicals we took the Dualex and the Maya spectrometer to Szeged.
Szeged is a nice city and we managed to wander through the old city in spite of the packed conference programme. None of us took a camera to Szeged so we have no photos to post.
Lately I have been getting a flood of spam comments. A lot were filtered by the anti-spam tools, but I was getting something like 20 comments to moderate per day. I decided to stop this by allowing comment writing only by logged-in users. So if you want to post a comment, please, remember to login first.
The paper How Realistically Does Outdoor UV-B Supplementation with Lamps Reflect Ozone Depletion: An Assessment of Enhancement Errors from our group and collaborators has been published on-line as Early View in Photochemistry and Photobiology.
The first annual meeting of the COST action on plants and UV-B will take place on 6-9 February 2011 in Szeged, Hungary. Please, submit your abstracts as soon as possible, especially if you want to qualify for a reimbursement of travel expenses. The web site of the conference is already live, please register if you plan to participate. Payment of the registration fee can be done later.
The spectroradiometer arrived today. Looks very nice!
The cosine diffuser has not yet arrived.
I have been using Xmarks (earlier called Foxmarks) for a long time to synchronize bookmarks and saved passwords among all the computers I use. It is an incredibly useful piece of software, and a free service until now. The developers cannot keep it as a free service any longer, and have announced that the service will be closed. Many people commented in the Xmarks blog that they would be willing to pay an annual fee for the system to be maintained. If you use regularly more than one PC or Mac or both you should be using Xmarks. There is a pledge to pay USD 10 per year to keep the service. I have made the pledge, and hope other people also pledge so that the system can be maintained. Xmarks is much better than any of the free alternatives and the only one to allows syncing across the Mac/PC divide or between different browsers.
The demise of Xmarks would be really sad. Please pledge to pay, if you have use for Xmarks. There are just a few days.
After careful research and comparison of the available instruments within our budget, I ordered:
Ocean Optics Maya 2000 Pro, grating #HC1, 10 um slit, order sorting filter (range 200-1100 nm, resolution 0.8 nm FWHM).
2 m fibre
Bentham D7-H-SMA cosine diffuser
ThinkPad laptop
Delivery and calibration will take until beginning of 2011.
University of Helsinki