BY KEUM YOUNG LEE  ASPB Student Ambassador, PhD Candidate in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington (Originally published January 2014) Professor, University of Washington Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh has been a faculty member in the Botany and Biology Departments,…

IN BRIEF by Gregory Bertoni [email protected] Autophagy, or "self eating," is the process cells use to consume unwanted intracellular structures such as damaged organelles, excess membranes, and unneeded cellular proteins (Mizushima and Komatsu, 2011). Typically, the unwanted structure becomes surrounded…

How does ecosystem restoration affect ecosystem services such as pollination? Kaiser-Bunbury et al. analysed 64 plant-pollinator networks across four restored and four unrestored communities. Restoration involved the removal of all exotic plants (nearly 40,000 individuals). After restoration, over a…

The indigenous Chinese rice variety Gumei 4 (GM4) shows durable and specific resistance to the rice blast fungal pathogen Manaporthe oryzae. Deng et al. mapped and sequenced the resistance locus Pigm, and found that it contains a cluster of 13 NLR (nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat) genes, three…

Without eyes, mouths or noses, how do carnivorous plants know that they’ve captured prey? Previous studies in various carnivorous species have shown that electrical signals as well as the jasmonate defense hormones contribute to prey detection. Krausko et al. examined these signals in leaves of the…

Cephalotus follicularis is a heterophyllous pitcher plant that makes two types of leaves, carnivorous and non-carnivorous. By growing plants at different temperatures, Fukushima et al. were able to get plants to produce one of the two leaf forms. They sequenced the plant’s genome and compared transcriptomes…

A healthy human diet should include phytonutrients such as carotenoids. Several approaches including classical breeding and transgenic plant production have been used to increase carotenoid abundance in plant tissues; challenges to these approaches include feedback controls, cell toxicity due to abnormally…

There are more than 25,000 species in the Orchidaceae, the orchid family. Chao et al. have updated and restructured the Orchidstra database, which now houses more than half-a million protein-coding genes from 18 species (12 genera and five subfamilies). Access and explore it at http://orchidstra2.abrc.sinica.edu.tw.…