A persisting falsehood resurfaced on Facebook this week, with users sharing a video suggesting that the federal agency found that a few of the popular house plants would be enough to save a human trapped inside without airflow. Assistant Professor Berkley Walker helps to dispel this myth.

Postdoctoral Researcher Amit K. Singh from the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory Ducat lab was awarded the 2023 Postdoctoral Excellence in Research Award from the MSU Office of Postdoctoral Affairs and the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation for his research in green biotechnology.

Undergraduate researchers from six MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory groups participated in the 2023 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum, three taking home first-place awards for their poster presentations.

Graduate student Hannah Parks and postdoctoral researcher María Santos Merino have been awarded the 2023 Anton Lang Memorial Awards at a ceremony which took place on Monday, April 24, 2023. This year’s lecture was given by University Distinguished Professor Thomas D. Sharkey from Michigan State University.

The original interview with Joanne was published in the MSU College of Natural Science Connections magazine. This is an extended version of that interview. 

Three groups from the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory participated in the 2023 MSU Science Festival. The Community Building and Outreach Committee, the Vermaas lab and the Sharkey lab volunteered to bring PRL science to the public at the university’s annual festival.

Michigan State University’s renowned plant researchers are collaborating on solutions to grow more abundant, nutritious and resilient plants that will feed a growing population.

Cyanobacteria, photosynthetic microorganisms which have widespread uses in the production of pigments, antioxidants and supplements and potential ones in biofuels and plastics, have a new way to communicate with one another to control their population, researchers from the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory Ducat lab show.

Michigan State University scientists, from their labs on campus to the fields of farmers in Michigan and beyond, are creating a roadmap to feed the world.

PRL faculty member Federica Brandizzi discusses agricultural innovation. The world’s population is growing, and climate change is continuing to impact the crops we need to feed that growing population.

The moon holds answers, and MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory plant biologists Federica Brandizzi and Joanne Thomson are bringing those answers within reach. Patience, creativity and a cheerful fearlessness are turning insights buried in plant seeds into pathways to the very survival of the human race.

Found in acidic volcanic hot springs, the extremophilic alga Cyanidioschyzon merolae contains a unique process that allows them to survive in extreme environments. Researchers, led by graduate student Anne Steensma from the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, are looking at this process and its potential to change how we understand the ways photosynthetic organisms adapt to environmental challenges like high temperatures. 

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, or GLBRC, another five years of funding to develop sustainable alternatives to gasoline, diesel and other hydrocarbon fuels as well as products currently made from petroleum. The center will receive $27.5 million for 2023 research.

Michigan State University has again been named a top producer of Fulbright U.S. Scholars — establishing MSU as the only research institution in the nation to achieve this status in the last nine consecutive years. With nine scholars, including the PRL's Gregg Howe, MSU is also notably among the top five-highest-producing institutions this year.

By explaining a photosynthetic peculiarity in switchgrass, MSU researchers from the Walker lab may have unlocked even more of the plant’s potential.

Researchers from the Vermaas lab created a more efficient tool to solve the problem of ring piercings in molecular simulations. This work is published in Biomolecules.

Complicated sets of biological data can be challenging to extrapolate meaningful information from. Wanting to find a better way to look at this data led Berkley Walker, assistant professor at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, to team up with statistician and Assistant Professor Chih-Li Sung from the Department of Statistics and Probability.

A new study from researchers at Michigan State University underscores that we still have much to learn regarding how plants will function — and how nutritious they will be — as more carbon enters our atmosphere.