Recent Posts

Highlights of plant science 2017. Nov-Dec

The last week of the year is the time to look back and reflect. We like to take this opportunity to recognize the good work done by the plant science community. During this final week of 2017 we've been reminding you of some of the big stories and successes that came from our community. These stories…

Axis of Algae: Disruption of Basal Cell Fates in the Brown Alga Ectocarpus

Polarization may be bad for civil discourse, but sometimes polarization can be good—for example, if you’re a multicellular organism setting its body axes. In many organisms, polarity within the zygote sets the stage for an asymmetric cell division that defines the apical-basal polarity of the developing…

Highlights of plant science 2017. Sept-Oct

The last week of the year is the time to look back and reflect. We like to take this opportunity to recognize the good work done by the plant science community. During this week we've been reminding you of some of the big stories and successes that came from our community. These stories were highly accessed…

Highlights of plant science 2017. Jul-Aug

The last week of the year is the time to look back and reflect. We like to take this opportunity to recognize the good work done by the plant science community. Over the next few days we'll remind you of some of the big stories and successes that came from our community. These stories were highly accessed…

Stochastic gene expression in Arabidopsis thaliana

Biology is a noisy act, as the expression of the same gene in the cells of the same tissue differs. This noise can be divided into intrinsic noise, due to inherent stochasticity of molecular processes, and extrinsic noise, indicating differences between the neighboring cells. Schultheiß Araújo and…

Arabidopsis calcium-dependent protein kinase AtCPK1 plays a positive role in salt/drought-stress response ($)

Ca2+-dependent protein kinases (CPKs) can transfer calcium signals via phosphorylation events, a signaling process important for plant development and response to environmental stresses. With the multitude of CPKs thus far identified and their overlapping roles in both abiotic and biotic stress response,…

APOPLASTP: prediction of effectors and plant proteins in the apoplast using machine learning ($)

The apoplast represents a highly interactive site for intercellular communication and transport in plant-microbe interaction, that determines whether a pathogen can successfully overcome the early stages of plant defense. This site is also a battleground for an important class of apoplastic effectors…

The diversity of floral temperature patterns, and their use by pollinators

Bees and other pollinators experience the world in a different way to humans. They use different strategies in order to identify their surroundings, including their preferred flower species. Among these strategies, floral temperature.  These differential “floral warming” happens due to floral thermogenesis…

Verification of Arabidopsis stock collections using SNPmatch, a tool for genotyping high-plexed samples

Experiments using large germplasm collections are prone to contamination. With dropping sequencing costs, it becomes easier to validate the genotype using minimal sequencing coverage. Pisupati and colleagues developed an open-source python pipeline, called SNPmatch, allowing identification of 930 Arabidopsis…