Cultivating Plant Scientists

Plant scientists celebrate new woody plant genome.

Our friends often remind us that scientists are strange beasts. As such, it is fitting that we should rejoice at the release of a major new genome by further scholarship and analysis – using the genome to unravel new elements of plant physiology and evolution. In this Feature Issue we celebrate the completion of the genome of Eucalyptus grandis (Myburg et al., 2014), the first representative of...

It's all GO for plant scientists.

The Gene Ontology project (http://www.geneontology.org/) produces structured, controlled vocabularies and gene product annotations. Gene products are classified according to the cellular locations and biological process in which they act, and the molecular functions that they carry out. We annotate gene products from a broad range of model species and provide support for those groups that wish ...

Making open data work for plant scientists

Despite the clear demand for open data sharing, its implementation within plant science is still limited. This is, at least in part, because open data-sharing raises several unanswered questions and challenges to current research practices. In this commentary, some of the challenges encountered by plant researchers at the bench when generating, interpreting, and attempting to disseminate their ...

Crossing Perspectives Farmers and Scientists in Participatory Plant Breeding

Cultivating Virtue

Ought you to cultivate your own virtue? Various philosophers have argued that there is something suspect about directing one’s ethical attention towards oneself in this way. These arguments can be divided between those that deem aiming at virtue for its own sake to be narcissistic and those that consider aiming at virtue for the sake of good behaviour to involve a kind of doublethink. Underlyin...