Recent Posts

Eight things that you should consider for securing the dream academic job

By Yasin Dagdas Part of the Self-Reflection; series by and for early-career researchers You have been studying for ~15 years and finally you are at a crossroad where you will make an important decision to start cashing out your “delayed gratifications”. Although I strongly believe there are…

Review: The origin and evolution of mycorrhizal symbioses (New Phytol)

Many fungi are pathogens that kill or weaken their plant hosts. However, there are also many species that form beneficial relationships with plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. One of these mutualisms is the mycorrhizal association between a fungus and a plant root, where the fungus provides the plant…

Review: Key questions and challenges in angiosperm macroevolution (New Phytol)

Are you curious about why and how angiosperms, flowering plants, are the youngest lineage of land plants and have become the most abundant group of plants? You are not alone. Generations of botanists and evolutionary biologists have wondered about this same thing. Many questions have been answered, such…

Review: Heat and drought tolerance in wheat – now and for the future (J Exp Bot)

Stress due to high heat and drought causes losses in wheat production all over the world. While genetic variation and quantitative trait loci for drought and heat tolerance are known, the genetic loci that underlie tolerance to these combined stress are likely different from those that underlie each…

Breakthrough Technology: Soft X-ray imaging of cellular carbon and nitrogen distributions in cyanobacteria (Plant Phys)

Soft X-ray imaging is a promising new technology that can be used to measure elemental compositions of living cells. By adjusting the energy (wavelength) of the incident X-rays, it is possible to specifically measure C or N, which have different photo-absorption edges.  Teramoto et al. demonstrate the…

Translational coincidence in Arabidopsis (Mol Syst Biol)

Changes in photoperiod affect metabolism and development, as well as flowering time, hypocotyl elongation, freezing tolerance, stomatal opening, C-allocation and growth. Seaton and collaborators measured the Arabidopsis proteome under four photoperiods: 6h, 8h, 12h and 18 hours. At longer photoperiods,…

An epigenetic origin behind the transgenerational fitness decline in chromatin assembly impaired plants (New Phytol) ($)

Packaging of nuclear DNA in chromatin is critical for the maintenance of genome integrity as well as fundamental cellular processes such as DNA replication and transcription. Chromatin assembly is mediated by histone chaperones, such as Chromatin Assembly Factor 1 (CAF-1). CAF-1 ensures faithful replication-coupled…

TSO1 and MYB3R1 form a regulatory module to coordinate cell proliferation with differentiation (PNAS)

In order to ensure proper development, plants need to balance cell proliferation and differentiation. Mutation in TSO1 causes disorganization of cell layers, leading to drastic reduction in fertility. A mutagenesis screen for rescue of fertility in the tso1-1 background identified  MYB3R1 as major partner…

Biosynthesis of redox active metabolites in response to iron deficiency in plants (Nature Chem Biol)

Iron is an essential but poorly bioavailable micronutrient that serves as a co-factor in many processes involved in electron- or oxygen-transfer. Land-plants evolved at least two distinct mechanism for iron uptake based on chelation of iron by phytosiderophores, that are produced only by grasses, or…