From robertkj from pgcc.edu Sat Dec 13 13:39:56 2008 From: robertkj from pgcc.edu (KARL ROBERTS) Date: Sat Dec 13 15:07:24 2008 Subject: [Plant-biology] International Science and Engineering Fair-Call for Judges Message-ID: Hi, I am the Plant Sciences Grand Awards Co-Chair for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair to be held May 10-15, 2009 in Reno, Nevada. I am actively seeking individuals to serve as Grand Awards Judges for the upcoming event. The ISEF is the premier world-wide showcase for student researchers from grades 9-12. This year students from 45 different countries compete for over $4 million dollars in cash awards, scholarships and special awards. In order to assure the quality of our winners, we need your help. As professionals in the biological sciences, you provide the knowledge and expertise necessary to choose the absolute best student finalists from among the many excellent research projects at this year's Fair. If you or your collegues are interested in becoming a Grand Awards judge this year, please visit the official ISEF website: http://www.sciserv.org/isef/judges/index.asp or feel to contact me via e-mail at kroberts@pgcc.edu or by phone at (301) 386-7544. Thanks for your consideration, and I hope to hear from you. Karl J. Roberts, Ph.D. Plant Sciences Grand Awards Co-Chair Intel ISEF Karl J. Roberts, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Department of Biological Sciences Prince George's Community College 301 Largo Road Largo, MD 20774-2199 Office: Chesapeake Hall 310M Fax: 301-386-7529 email: KRoberts@pgcc.edu From markokostich from gmail.com Sat Dec 20 03:56:18 2008 From: markokostich from gmail.com (Marko Kostic) Date: Sat Dec 20 14:03:32 2008 Subject: [Plant-biology] Effect of hyperbaric pressure on plants??? Message-ID: Hi' After all these years did you find an answer? I'm interested too. Thanks in advance. Marko Kostic Effect of hyperbaric pressure on plants???*Sarah Cook* nstn2301 at fox.nstn.ca *Sun Jan 22 11:46:31 EST 1995* - Previous message: Water Lily..Lily Pads - Next message: Summer pro - *Messages sorted by:* [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] ------------------------------ Hi! I'm a high school student looking for a science project idea. I am interested in the effect of hyperbaric pressure on plant growth and repair. I am aware that hyperbaric chambers are used to speed up recovery from injuries in humans (i.e. sports injuries). Does anyone hnow about the effects on plants? Is there any way I could create a hyperbaric chamber in which to test this idea? Please help! http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/plantbio/1995-January/005005.html From ronaldmr from yahoo.com Mon Dec 22 03:26:27 2008 From: ronaldmr from yahoo.com (Ronald Maldonado Rodriguez) Date: Mon Dec 22 14:13:57 2008 Subject: [Plant-biology] Re: Plantbio Digest, Vol 43, Issue 2 In-Reply-To: <200812211704.mBLH4rV08926@net.bio.net> Message-ID: <864019.69292.qm@web52503.mail.re2.yahoo.com> I believe Marine aquatic plant physiology can help also to answer that question. Plants growing at 1, 5, 10, 20, or even 50 m undersea have different hyperbaric conditions and therefore, some effect on marine vegetation physiology should be observed. In internet we find any kind of references like the guy who claims that plants do not stop growing under hyperbaric conditions: "In two years a tomato plant grown in a hyperbaric chamber grew to a height of 16 feet and produced 930 tomatoes! That's not all! It didn't stop growing! " at this site: http://www.geocities.com/johnh_vanbc/bible/preflood.html An interesting question answer we find in this Web site: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2004-02/1075764676.Bt.r.html Re: Can plants grow at gretaer than atmospheric air pressure Date: Mon Feb 2 17:18:09 2004 Posted By: David Hershey, Faculty, Botany, NA Area of science: Botany ID: 1075527828.Bt Message: Growing plants at above normal atmospheric pressure would involve a hyperbaric chamber. One recent study on ginkgo found as much as a 250% increase in the photosynthesis rate when the carbon dioxide was increased 500% and atmospheric pressure was increased 25%. I contacted the lead author, Sara Decherd, and she kindly told me that they found no significant effect on photosynthesis with a 25% increase in atmospheric pressure alone. She was also not aware of much other research on plant growth in hyperbaric chambers. It seems to be an area that has not been thoroughly studied. The ginkgo research was recently featured in a news release, "A Lot of Hot Air: How the Dinosaurs Grew So Monstrous." NASA has done work on growing plants at less than atmospheric pressure in hypobaric chambers. Hypobaric greenhouses with one-sixteenth the pressure of an Earth atmosphere may be required for Mars colonization. At normal atmospheric pressures, increasing the carbon dioxide concentration up to about 1,000 ppm often increases plant growth. Current atmospheric carbon dioxide is about 360 ppm. Thus, you might expect a positive effect on plant growth in a hyperbaric chamber. I doubt a soda bottle would be a satisfactory hypobaric chamber. It would be difficult and expensive for a school student to maintain an elevated carbon dioxide level in a hyperbaric plant growth chamber because a plant can rapidly deplete the carbon dioxide given its low concentration and the limited chamber volume. Be very cautious if you try to make your own hyperbaric chamber because an explosion is always a possibility. It would be much easier to demonstrate effects of carbon dioxide enrichment at normal atmospheric pressures. A soda bottle system to inexpensively induce carbon dioxide deficiency in plants can be built using rubber stoppers, aquarium tubing, aquarium valves and an aquarium air pump (Hershey 1992, 1995). The same system could be used to elevate the carbon dioxide level using dry ice or acid mixing with calcium carbonate as a source of carbon dioxide= From chenx071 from umn.edu Mon Dec 22 21:59:12 2008 From: chenx071 from umn.edu (Wen-Ping Chen) Date: Tue Dec 23 14:25:27 2008 Subject: [Plant-biology] Re: Plantbio Digest, Vol 43, Issue 2 In-Reply-To: <864019.69292.qm@web52503.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <200812211704.mBLH4rV08926@net.bio.net> <864019.69292.qm@web52503.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <003d01c964aa$6ff69a20$4fe3ce60$@edu> I am a research associate in the Department of Horticultural Science at the University of Minnesota. I have been growing plants under slightly higher than atmosphere pressure (<3kPa) in a chamber I built for plant labeling with 13CO2. The project I am working on is to develop a method to measure protein turnover in plants using stable isotope labeling coupling with mass spectrometry analysis. Because we attempt to enrich our plants with 13C as high as possible using 99%atom 13CO2, the chamber pressure is maintained slightly positive to avoid ambient CO2 movement from outside to the chamber. One interesting thing I noticed from my research was that plants grew normally under pressure 2-3 kPa higher than the atmosphere but when growing them under pressure 5-6 kPa higher than the atmosphere they formed brittle leaves. I didn't try to increase the pressure higher than 6kPa because my chamber was not built to handle higher pressure. The brittle leaves formed under higher positive pressure I guessed might be a result of accumulation of lignin on the cell wall or thickening of cell wall. Just wanted to share my two cent information. Hope it would stimulate more discussion on this interesting question. Wen -----Original Message----- From: plantbio-bounces@oat.bio.indiana.edu [mailto:plantbio-bounces@oat.bio.indiana.edu] On Behalf Of Ronald Maldonado Rodriguez Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 2:26 AM To: plantbio@oat.bio.indiana.edu Subject: [Plant-biology] Re: Plantbio Digest, Vol 43, Issue 2 I believe Marine aquatic plant physiology can help also to answer that question. Plants growing at 1, 5, 10, 20, or even 50 m undersea have different hyperbaric conditions and therefore, some effect on marine vegetation physiology should be observed. In internet we find any kind of references like the guy who claims that plants do not stop growing under hyperbaric conditions: "In two years a tomato plant grown in a hyperbaric chamber grew to a height of 16 feet and produced 930 tomatoes! That's not all! It didn't stop growing! " at this site: http://www.geocities.com/johnh_vanbc/bible/preflood.html An interesting question answer we find in this Web site: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2004-02/1075764676.Bt.r.html Re: Can plants grow at gretaer than atmospheric air pressure Date: Mon Feb 2 17:18:09 2004 Posted By: David Hershey, Faculty, Botany, NA Area of science: Botany ID: 1075527828.Bt Message: Growing plants at above normal atmospheric pressure would involve a hyperbaric chamber. One recent study on ginkgo found as much as a 250% increase in the photosynthesis rate when the carbon dioxide was increased 500% and atmospheric pressure was increased 25%. I contacted the lead author, Sara Decherd, and she kindly told me that they found no significant effect on photosynthesis with a 25% increase in atmospheric pressure alone. She was also not aware of much other research on plant growth in hyperbaric chambers. It seems to be an area that has not been thoroughly studied. The ginkgo research was recently featured in a news release, "A Lot of Hot Air: How the Dinosaurs Grew So Monstrous." NASA has done work on growing plants at less than atmospheric pressure in hypobaric chambers. Hypobaric greenhouses with one-sixteenth the pressure of an Earth atmosphere may be required for Mars colonization. At normal atmospheric pressures, increasing the carbon dioxide concentration up to about 1,000 ppm often increases plant growth. Current atmospheric carbon dioxide is about 360 ppm. Thus, you might expect a positive effect on plant growth in a hyperbaric chamber. I doubt a soda bottle would be a satisfactory hypobaric chamber. It would be difficult and expensive for a school student to maintain an elevated carbon dioxide level in a hyperbaric plant growth chamber because a plant can rapidly deplete the carbon dioxide given its low concentration and the limited chamber volume. Be very cautious if you try to make your own hyperbaric chamber because an explosion is always a possibility. It would be much easier to demonstrate effects of carbon dioxide enrichment at normal atmospheric pressures. A soda bottle system to inexpensively induce carbon dioxide deficiency in plants can be built using rubber stoppers, aquarium tubing, aquarium valves and an aquarium air pump (Hershey 1992, 1995). The same system could be used to elevate the carbon dioxide level using dry ice or acid mixing with calcium carbonate as a source of carbon dioxide_______________________________________________ Plantbio mailing list Plantbio@net.bio.net http://www.bio.net/biomail/listinfo/plantbio From ecker from salk.edu Tue Dec 23 22:28:19 2008 From: ecker from salk.edu (Joseph R. Ecker) Date: Wed Dec 24 01:09:49 2008 Subject: [Plant-biology] The National Plant Genome Initiative at Ten Years: A Community Worksho Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, I would like to draw your attention to a Wiki site http://npgi-workshop.wetpaint.com/?mail=1128 that describes a summary of a recent workshop entitled: "The National Plant Genome Initiative at Ten Years: A Community Workshop" This site contains information (agenda, Rapporteur's summaries, session/Q&A notes, list of meeting participants and a meeting summary) related to the recent National Plant Genome Initiative Workshop held at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Conference Center of the National Academies in Irvine California on August 26-28, 2008. The purpose of the meeting was to bring a broad group of stakeholders together to discuss the outcomes of the first ten years of the US National Plant Genome Initiative (NPGI) as well as the challenges and opportunities ahead for the next five to ten years. The NPGI started in 1998 and is managed by the Interagency Working Group on Plant Genomes (IWG-PG). The IWG-PG is currently in the process of developing a new five-year plan using a variety of inputs, including the outcomes of this workshop. I hope that you find the information provided useful. Happy Holidays Joe Ecker Joseph R. Ecker Professor, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies Plant Biology/Genomic Analysis Laboratories 10010 North Torrey Pines Road La Jolla, CA 92037 Phone (858) 453-4100 x1752 FAX (858) 558-6379 Web addresses: http://www.salk.edu http://signal.salk.edu http://pbio.salk.edu/pbioe/finaleckerhomepage.html http://www.salk.edu/faculty/ecker.html Administrative Assistant: Nancy Benson Phone (858) 453-4100 x1106 Fax (858) 558-6379 email: nbenson@salk.edu