Category Archives: Literature

Resources for drought genes in sunflower

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Recently, I hassled people until they gave me places to look for lists of genes expressed in response to drought treatment in Helianthus. Perhaps you will find it useful too?

Marchand et al. 2014 drought gene regulatory network: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12818/full.

Based on experimental data from Rengel et al. 2012: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0045249

And more in Marchand’s thesis: http://thesesups.ups-tlse.fr/2597/

Additionally, Min has some data/preliminary analysis from a microarray study in sunflower. Contact him for more info?

Where to submit your manuscript?

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I was recently made aware of an online tools called JANE (Journal/ Author Name Estimator), which helps you to decide where you should submit a recent paper you are working on. Essentially you copy and paste your abstract into the online tool and it spits out a ranked list of journals where you should submit your paper. It seems to work pretty well. If you test it with abstract of recently published papers, the journal where the paper is actually published almost always comes up in the top 3 choices. JANE also has other functionality of potential use, like finding citations or authors related to your abstract.

This is where it gets interesting.

I read a little more about how the program works. It basically pulls all published abstracts from pubmed and then text mines them for keywords found in your abstract. Now say you’ve written a manuscript; you run it through JANE and it tells you that the best fit is “American Journal of Botany”. But secretly, you hoped that your manuscript would go into a higher profile journal like say “Genetics”. Should you give up all hopes and submit it to AJB? Of course not! What you should do is go look at abstracts published in Genetics and AJB and find out what are the key differences between them. Often, they are surprisingly subtle and by making slight modifications to your abstract, all of a sudden it can become a great fit for Genetics!

So this online tool can actually be very useful to write abstract in the style of the journal you wish to submit to. In addition, I know at least one senior editor at a high profile journal who uses this tool to guide decisions to send manuscript out for review. This is probably not a good decision on their part, but at least now you can use it to your advantage!

Tissue dessication with table salt

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There is a new paper published by Elena Carrió and Josep A. Roselló online early in Molecular Ecology Resources that suggests salt dessication of leaves dehydrates and prevents decay at levels similar to that of silica gel, with similar PCR results.

Large-grain silica is probably still the best option, but this would come in really handy if you come across something interesting that you want to collect but don’t happen to have silica gel with you.

Here is the main figure (link to the paper below):

Thanks to Maggie Wagner from the TMO lab who found this paper and sent it around. Here is a link to the full article:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1755-0998.12170/full

DOI: 10.1111/1755-0998.12170

Obscure Sunflower CMS References

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Hello,

I recently took advantage of Hannes, our man in the FAO, to obtain two obscure references about CMS in cultivated sunflower. Hannes, or rather his intern Brian, has sent me scans:

Serieys (1996) Identification, Study And Utilisation In Breeding Programs Of New CMS Sources. Helia 19:144-160.

Serieys (????) Identification, Study And Utilisation In Breeding Programs Of New CMS Sources. FAO Progress Report 1999-2001.

If you have any interest in the cms literature you have probably noticed that everybody cites these papers to make the claim that there are many sources of cms in sunflower. Now you can too.

Thanks Hannes, and thanks Brian.

 

Dan.