Recent Posts

Counting Carbs: Tracking Fluctuations in Starch-Derived Metabolite Levels Uncovers Their Crucial Roles in Osmotic Stress Tolerance

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IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart jlockhart@aspb.org At first glance, starch is just an inert, calorie-laden material produced by plants to store excess carbohydrates derived from photosynthesis. Starch accumulates in leaf mesophyll cells during the day and is metabolized at night. The precise circadian…

Examination of Protein Complexes Gets SiMPull

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IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach jmach@aspb.org Assessing protein-protein interactions remains a fundamental challenge for plant biologists. Current methods such as coimmunoprecipitation (co-IP), yeast two-hybrid, bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC), and others can produce artifacts and also yield…

Improving carotenoid production in synthetic maize through data-driven mathematical modeling ($)

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Carotenoids are nutritionally important phytonutrients. Comas et al. describe a strategy to enhance the production of cartotenoids in the seed endosperm. They start with quantitative metabolomics and gene expression data which they feed into mathematical models to determine which gene(s) need to be engineered.…

Recognizing featured Plant Cell first authors, July 2016

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Recently, we’ve been profiling first authors of Plant Cell papers that are selected for In Brief summaries. Here are the first-author profiles from the July issue of The Plant Cell. Fangwei Gu, featured first author of Arabidopsis CSLD5 functions in cell plate formation in a cell cycle-dependent manner Current…

Divide and Conquer: Introducing a Novel Player in Cell Plate Formation

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IN BRIEF by Kathleen L. Farquharson kfarquharson@aspb.org Polysaccharide-rich cell walls are a distinguishing feature of plants that influence many aspects of growth and development, including cell division. Whereas contractile rings pinch dividing cells into two daughter cells in other eukaryotes,…