Plant occupation of land was a crucial step in evolution, without which life as we know it today would not exist. Stefan Rensing takes us on an evolutionary journey, discussing the advent of photosynthesis in cyanobacteria and eukaryotic algae, which led to atmospheric oxygen, to plant terrestrialization,…

DNA repair is of course a crucial process, and many DNA repair enzymes are conserved across all domains of life. In humans, deficiency in the RecQ family of DNA helicase repair enzymes leads to premature aging and a predisposition to cancer. Previous studies have identified the RecQ family in Arabidopsis…

Three letters to Plant Physiology address the role of vesicles in auxin transport, discussing the evidence and conclusions from a recently published paper from three perspectives. Does auxin accumulate in endocytic vesicles? If so, how, and why? The Letters address both the methods used and the intrepetation…

Rising atmospheric CO2 levels are causing wide-ranging climate abnormalities. Beerling et al. discuss ways to capture CO2 in soils through augmenting soils with crushed basalt, or silicate-rich wastes such as sugarcane mill ash. As the added rock weathers, it reacts with gaseous CO2 to release cations…

Put a plant into full darkness and it will gradually senesce, whereas as individually darkened leaf (IDL) will undergo radid senescence. Law et al. used transcriptomic and metabolomic methods to identify the metabolic responses of plants to these two conditions. In fully darkened plants, metabolism is…

Maximizing and improving biomass productivity is essential for grower profitability, to protect natural resources, and to meet global population needs. Unfortunately, assessing biomass usually requires destructive sampling which delays the process for breeding high biomass germplasm. Remote sensing is…

Lichen are quite special, as they don’t exist independently of their partnership.  Lichen are composed of a fungal partner and a photosynthetic partner (the algal or cyanobacterial photobiont), and these partnerships have evolved independently many times.  Spribille provides an overview of some of…

To generate new plant varieties with desirable traits, plant geneticists cross existing varieties that contain the characters they want to combine. The genetic variability is obtained thanks to events called crossovers, in which segments of homologous chromosomes are swapped during meiosis. The frequency…