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Botany

Botany is the area of biology that studies the plant kingdom. Botany encompasses the growth, reproduction, metabolism, development, diseases, ecology and evolution of plants.

Åsa Strand,  professor vid Institutionen för fysiologisk botanik
Understanding plant signaling systems for more resilient crops

Åsa Strand wants to develop robust crops to ensure food security for the world's population.

Believes in a change in GMO legislation

Stefan Jansson, professor of plant physiology, believes it's an ideal time to make legal changes.

Integrated Science Lab (Icelab)
We take a modelling approach for causal understanding and connect researchers from different backgrounds.
Plant Growth Facilities at Umeå Plant Science Centre
Umeå Plant Science Center has a number of different facilities to grow plants in controlled environments.
Research area: Botany
Two-photon in vivo physiology
The infrastructure offers a combination of multiphoton and imaging systems at high spatio-temporal resolution, combined with other physiological...
Research area: Biological sciences, Botany
Umeå Plant Science Centre, växtforskning Jian-Feng Mao
Long non-coding RNAs, called lncRNAs, are transcribed from DNA as other RNAs but they do not carry instructions for proteins. Instead, they help controlling genes, guide plant development and are involved in plant responses to stress like drought or heat. Identifying these lncRNAs has been difficult because their genetic sequences vary a lot between different plant species. The team around Jian-Feng Mao tackled the problem using machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence that is trained on large amounts of data to find patterns. They analysed over 1,600 different features of lncRNAs and identified just three key features that could effectively distinguish lncRNAs from RNAs containing the code for a protein. Identification of sequence patterns using mathematical parameters What makes PlantLncBoost particularly innovative is its use of mathematical parameters to capture intrinsic sequence properties beyond traditional biological features. The research team used so called Fourier transformation-based approaches. That allowed them to detect patterns in the RNA sequences that are consistent across diverse plant species despite of the high variability in the genetic sequences. “Through systematic evaluation of multiple machine learning algorithms and rigorous parameter optimization, we have developed a tool that achieves both high accuracy and strong generalization capabilities,” explains Jian-Feng Mao, Associate professor at Umeå University who established his lab at the Umeå Plant Science Centre in 2023. To make sure their new tool worked, the team tested PlantLncBoost on datasets from 20 different plant species. It correctly identified lncRNAs with over 96% accuracy, significantly outperforming existing tools. The tool even recognised nearly all 358 long lncRNAs that had been experimentally validated before, including those from twelve species that were not included in the training set used to develop the tool. New possibilities to analyse long non-coding RNAs across species “Developing PlantLncBoost was an exciting opportunity to apply machine learning to solve a complex biological problem,” says first author Xue-Chan Tian, who completed this work as part of her PhD thesis at Beijing Forestry University. “My doctoral programme focused on combining advanced computational methods with plant genomics to extract meaningful biological insights from complex sequence data.” The project brought together experts in genomics, bioinformatics and computer science from around the world, including researchers from Sweden, China and Brazil. The tool is now freely available to the scientific community and has been integrated in a larger analysis workflow that was developed earlier by Jian-Feng Mao’s group. It allows not only to identify but also to characterise lncRNAs in plants. By implementing PlantLncBoost in this workflow, researchers can now identify long non-coding RNAs from different plant species much more accurate, making it easier to compare and analyse them.

Better identification of plant-specific long non-coding RNAs allows comparisons across species.

Laura Bacete with shoulder-long brown hair and a blue lab coat is watchin on a plate with green seedlings that she holds in her hand. Behind her are methal shelves with more plates.
Laura Bacete Cano becomes a member of the Young Academy of Sweden

Assistant Professor Laura Bacete Cano is one of eight new members elected to the Young Academy of Sweden.

Olivier Keech wearing a blue sweater is sitting in a lab holding a round plate with blue spots in his one hand and is pointing with the small finger of his other hand on to it. He smiles into the camera.
New project aims to turn residues into high-quality animal feed

A new project aims to support the development of a more sustainable economy by turning waste into feed.

Stress Response Modeling at IceLab

A multidisciplinary complexity center formed to unveil universal principles and adaptive mechanisms in living systems under stress.

Duration 1 January 2024
Type of project Research project
Statistical Learning for Chronosilviculture
Research area: Botany, Mathematics, Statistics
Duration 1 February 2023 until 31 January 2025
Type of project Post-doc project
Does it have to be “first come, first served” for roots and plants?
Research area: Botany, Ecology
Duration 1 January 2020 until 31 December 2023
Type of project Research project
Are there glycosylated proteins in plastids?
Research area: Biological sciences, Botany
Duration 22 January 2008 until 1 February 2009
Type of project Research project
The role of some of the extrinsic proteins in the oxygen evolution mechanism
Research area: Biological sciences, Botany
Duration 22 January 2008 until 31 December 2009
Type of project Research project