Recent Posts

EDITORIAL: The Plant Cell Begins Opt-in Publishing of Peer Review Reports

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As of January 2017, The Plant Cell will offer authors the option of associating a Peer Review Report with each research article. Reviewer anonymity will be strictly maintained. The reports will include the major comments from reviewers and the editors’ decision letters along with the authors’ response…

RNA Degradome Studies Give Insights into Ribosome Dynamics

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IN BRIEF by Gregory Bertoni gbertoni@aspb.org RNA metabolism is key to a number of crucial processes in the cell, including transcription, RNA splicing, translation, and gene regulation. For efficient translation, mature mRNAs must have a 7-methylguanosine cap on the 5′ end to help recruit the translation…

Recognizing featured Plant Cell first authors, October 2016

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 October issue of The Plant Cell. Olivia Wilkins and Christoph Hafemeister, featured first authors of EGRINs (Environmental Gene Regulatory Influence…

iGRAD-Plant, the International Graduate School for Plant Science

Last week I was a guest of the PhD students of the iGRAD-Plant program, based at Heinrich Heine University (HHU), Düsseldorf (Germany). The program is an international joint PhD program with the nearby Research Center Jülich and the Genetics Program of Michigan State University. The program is funded…

Congratulations to Yoshinori Ohsumi

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Warmest congratulations to Yoshinori Ohsumi, 2016 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, “for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy”.  Autophagy (self-eating) is a process through which cells selectively degrade and recycle cellular components. Ohsumi’s research has primarily focused…

From LUCA to Lily: 12 perspectives for teaching about plants

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The other day I was talking to a friend about the need to demystify plants, so that teachers feel as confident in their teaching of plant biology as they do about animal biology. I wonder if sometimes we teach plants too much in isolation, so it’s not always clear how plants relate to other organisms…