Plant Success

Novelties, Frauds, and Protections: The Fruit Business in Nineteenth-Century America
2022-10-18 09:00 - 10:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom
In the United States through the 1830s, commercial fruit nurseries were few in number, served largely local markets, and, facing little competition, did little in their catalogues to differentiate and brand their products. Beginning in the 1820s, the transportation revolution, the migrations westward, and the creation of relentlessly expanding markets steadily enlarged competition and put a premium on the innovation of novel fruits. Plants were not patentable at the time. Plant nurseries, hitherto members of close-knit local communities, had tended to rely on mutual trust to prevent the appropriation of their innovations. However, operating in increasingly impersonal regional and national markets they sought to protect their investments in the creation or acquisition of novelties by branding their products. Still, cheats could offer fraudulent or adulterated fruit trees or vines under the branded name, and purchasers would be none the wiser because it was virtually impossible to tell simply by inspection what plant or plant quality young trees or vines would eventually produce.
From the 1830s through the rest of the century, purveyors of innovations developed a variety of strategies to protect their brands. The strategies were well exemplified by several prominent nurseries, notably Ellwanger and Barry’s, in Rochester, New York; Charles Hovey’s, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Luther Burbank’s, in Santa Rosa, California. They emphasized in their catalogues the importance of purchasing only from reliable sources, included testimonials from happy customers, and provided lithographs – first black and white, then in color – of their branded fruits. Still, thieves of new fruit trees and vines could simply clone them and sell them under another brand name. In the face of that biological loophole, their originators charged exceptionally high prices for first sales, hoping therein to recoup the downstream revenues they would lose to appropriation. They also employed traveling salesmen to sell their trees and vines, instructed them to gain trust by behaving in a moral, upright manner, and equipped them with sample books that presented in full color the fruits purchasers would get if they bought and planted the nursery’s trees and vines. By the late nineteenth century, finding these protective strategies increasing inadequate, nurserymen began agitating for national legal protection of their branded novelties through trademarks and patents.
About People, Plants and the Law Online Lecture Series
The People, Plants, and the Law lecture series explores the legal and lively entanglements of human and botanical worlds.
Today people engage with and relate to plants in diverse and sometimes divergent ways. Seeds—and the plants that they produce—may be receptacles of memory, sacred forms of sustenance, or sites of resistance in struggles over food sovereignty. Simultaneously, they may be repositories of gene sequences, Indigenous knowledge, bulk commodities, or key components of economic development projects and food security programs.
This lecture series explores the special role of the law in shaping these different engagements, whether in farmers’ fields, scientific laboratories, international markets, or elsewhere.

Centre for Plant Success Webinar Series: Nick O'Brien and Caitlin Dudley
2022-09-15 10:00 - 11:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom
This event is open to Centre Members only. If you are a Centre Member who would like to attend, please contact admin@plantsuccess.org for the Zoom invitation.

Talking Plant Science: David Kainer
2022-09-08 09:00 - 10:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture is proud to bring you the next seminar in our Talking Plant Science series presented by Dr David Kainer.
Digging deeper into the GWAS signal with a little machine learning along the way
Genome Wide Association Studies, or GWAS, have become a standard tool for the discovery of the genetic basis of complex traits. For over a decade, results from GWAS have been used to guide experimentation, marker assisted selection and genetic engineering efforts. But for complex traits where we don’t have huge sample numbers (as with most plant studies!), GWAS outcomes can be very limited by multiple testing correction. Only loci that make it below the magic p-value threshold are deemed interesting. These loci often explain only a small fraction of the trait’s heritability, yet we know intuitively that many causal loci sit just ‘out of reach’. Here I will relate our efforts to relax those thresholds with the goal of reliably obtaining more of the trait genetic architecture. To deal with the peril of increasing false positives, multi-omic data sources such as gene expression and metabolic pathways can be fused into multiplex networks upon which network propagation algorithms tease apart the false positives from the true positives. I will demonstrate the process with examples in Arabidopsis and other species.
About the speaker: David is currently a Staff Scientist in the Computational Predictive Biology group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee USA. He specializes in analysing the genomic basis of complex traits to guide crop improvement through breeding and engineering. David received his PhD from the Australian National University’s Research School of Biology in 2017 after an earlier career in computer engineering and mobile game development. David focuses on biological network analysis, where multiple forms of ‘omic data are rendered as network layers and the combined (or Multiplexed) network is jointly traversed by machine learning algorithms such as Random Walks. This provides a platform for knowledge synthesis and discovery from highly complex, interconnected, heterogeneous data — a 21st century solution for a 21st century challenge.

Artificial by Nature: Plastic Flowers as Intangible Properties
2022-08-23 17:00 - 18:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom
In March 1961, the refusal of entry of a ‘Sweetheart Roses’ consignment into the United States began a series of interesting controversies concerning the copyright in plastic roses, geraniums, lilacs, and flower corsages. Although the history of these cases remains largely unexplored, this paper shows how significant they were in addressing the unstable distinction between the natural and the artificial, particularly when the subsistence of copyright was at stake. Artificial flowers simulated nature, but they did so in ways that forced copyright to construct its subject matter differently. The irony implicit here resulted in the law looking at flower construction as an artifice but trying to legitimate it by grounding the question of originality in the way nature itself was approached.
About People, Plants and the Law Online Lecture Series
The People, Plants, and the Law lecture series explores the legal and lively entanglements of human and botanical worlds.
Today people engage with and relate to plants in diverse and sometimes divergent ways. Seeds—and the plants that they produce—may be receptacles of memory, sacred forms of sustenance, or sites of resistance in struggles over food sovereignty. Simultaneously, they may be repositories of gene sequences, Indigenous knowledge, bulk commodities, or key components of economic development projects and food security programs.
This lecture series explores the special role of the law in shaping these different engagements, whether in farmers’ fields, scientific laboratories, international markets, or elsewhere.

Official Launch of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture
2022-08-11 15:00 - 16:00 UTC | Zoom
Thanks to the $35 million in funding from the Australian Research Council along with further support from partners, the Centre for Plant Success is making discoveries about the adaptive strategies underpinning productivity and resilience in diverse plants. The Centre for Plant Success will deepen knowledge of the genetic and physiological networks driving key traits for safeguarding and sustaining world food supply and biodiversity.
Join us to celebrate our official launch which will be streamed live from Brisbane, Queensland.

National Science Quiz 2022
2022-08-07 19:30 - 20:30 UTC | QLD
The ARC CoE for Plant Success is proud to sponsor the 2022 National Science Quiz!
Hosted by Charlie Pickering from ABC-TV’s The Weekly and joined by some of Australia’s top scientists with our special guest team captains, each team will battle it out for the honour of being this year’s National Science Quiz champions.
Join in person at The Edge in Melbourne or watch live online via YouTube.

Centre for Plant Success Webinar Series: Henry Arenas Castro
2022-07-28 10:00 - 11:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom

Plant Success ECR Workshop
2022-06-02 - 2022-06-03 | The Old Woolstore Apartment Hotel, 1 Macquarie Street, Hobart, Tasmania, 7000
Save the date! More details to come.

Talking Plant Science: Bruce Walsh
2022-06-01 14:00 - 15:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture is proud to bring you the next seminar in our Talking Plant Science series.
Bruce Walsh is a population and quantitative geneticist with very diverse interests in plant and animal breeding, evolutionary biology, and statistical methods. He obtained a BS in Mathematical Population Biology from UC Davis, and a PhD in genetics from the University of Washington. He is currently a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences, and Public Health at the University of Arizona. He is perhaps best known for the two graduate textbooks on quantitative genetics that he coauthored with Mike Lynch (Lynch & Walsh, 1998, Genetics and Analysis of Quantitative Traits [a new version, along with Peter Visscher at UQ, is in the works]; and Walsh & Lynch 2018, Evolution and Selection of Quantitative Traits). He has taught almost 100 short courses on quantitative genetics in over two dozen countries, on all continents (except for Antarctica, where he is still awaiting an invitation). He is also an avid Lepidopterist, having described almost 30 new species of moths and has three species named after him.

Plant Success Research Retreat 2022
2022-05-30 - 2022-06-01 | The Old Woolstore Apartment Hotel, 1 Macquarie Street, Hobart, Tasmania, 7000
The 2022 Plant Success Research Retreat will take place in Hobart, Tasmania from Monday 1 May to Wednesday 3 June. The retreat is open to all Centre Members to attend in person but virtual attendance will also be available.
Registration details to come.

Centre for Plant Success Webinar Series: Travis Britton
2022-05-20 10:00 - 11:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom

Supporting Indigenous Data: Introducing the Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels
2022-05-17 09:00 - 10:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom
Concerns over Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Indigenous rights under the Nagoya Protocol underpin the development and application of Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels/Notices. The Local Contexts system which delivers the Labels and Notices, is focused on implementing Indigenous provenance, protocols, and permissions into digital infrastructures.The Labels and Notices are designed to provide a persistent and durable connection between collaborating Indigenous communities and researchers, research projects, genetic resources, Digital Sequence Information (DSI), and associated traditional knowledge, that exist as metadata in sample/data repositories .
The Biocultural Labels support Nagoya Protocol expectations around the disclosure and origins of genetic resources (i.e. Provenance Label) and help to define and communicate Indigenous community expectations and consent about appropriate and future use of genetic resources and derived benefits. Importantly BC Labels may only be applied by an Indigenous community, and they are both human readable and machine readable. Each Label has a persistent unique identifier and the Label metadata (as text) is customized to each community context.
This presentation will introduce the Labels and Notices and explore the responsibilities that universities and researchers have to practically implement mechanisms that enable transparency around Indigenous rights and interests in support of Indigenous data sovereignty.
About People, Plants and the Law Online Lecture Series
The People, Plants, and the Law lecture series explores the legal and lively entanglements of human and botanical worlds.
Today people engage with and relate to plants in diverse and sometimes divergent ways. Seeds—and the plants that they produce—may be receptacles of memory, sacred forms of sustenance, or sites of resistance in struggles over food sovereignty. Simultaneously, they may be repositories of gene sequences, Indigenous knowledge, bulk commodities, or key components of economic development projects and food security programs.
This lecture series explores the special role of the law in shaping these different engagements, whether in farmers’ fields, scientific laboratories, international markets, or elsewhere.

Centre for Plant Success Webinar Series: Kalpani Galaihalage and Samuel Barton
2022-04-07 10:00 - 11:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom

Talking Plant Science: Charlie Messina
2022-03-25 10:00 - 11:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture is proud to bring you the first seminar in our new Talking Plant Science series.
Charlie Messina is a Professor of Predictive Breeding in the Department of Horticultural Sciences at the University of Florida. His program focuses on the development of prediction methods for agriculture and horticulture.

Stand and Deliver: Biopiracy, Law, and the Balkanization of the Genescape
2022-02-22 09:00 - 10:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom
For 40 years now the users and suppliers of agricultural biodiversity have traded charges of highway robbery. Seed companies demand that purchasers of their seed pay a royalty and respect the intellectual property rights they hold on the crop varieties they claim as their inventions. Peasants, Indigenous peoples, and biodiverse nations demand that they be compensated for access to the valuable genetic resources that they now realize they have been delivering free for the use of the seed companies.
As intellectual property and contract law have been extended globally to facilitate the profitability of the international seed trade, so has international law been developed to forestall biopiracy and provide “benefit sharing” in return for “access” to genetic resources. Kloppenburg will describe the inadequacies of this balancing act, and show how it has resulted in a deeply problematic “Balkanization” of the genescape that benefits no one. As an alternative, he looks to “open source” legal arrangements – especially those with “copyleft” provisions – as a possible foundation for a more just and regenerative regime of the use and exchange of plant genetic resources. FREE THE SEED!
About People, Plants and the Law Online Lecture Series
The People, Plants, and the Law lecture series explores the legal and lively entanglements of human and botanical worlds.
Today people engage with and relate to plants in diverse and sometimes divergent ways. Seeds—and the plants that they produce—may be receptacles of memory, sacred forms of sustenance, or sites of resistance in struggles over food sovereignty. Simultaneously, they may be repositories of gene sequences, Indigenous knowledge, bulk commodities, or key components of economic development projects and food security programs.
This lecture series explores the special role of the law in shaping these different engagements, whether in farmers’ fields, scientific laboratories, international markets, or elsewhere.

Centre for Plant Success Webinar Series: Melanie Wilkinson and Hendrik Poorter
2022-02-17 16:00 - 17:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Zoom
