This season we are busting myths, and in this episode, we discuss the myth that mentoring is a one-way street. We talk with our guest Beronda Montgomery, Ph.D., about a cyanobacterium that changes shape in response to stress, and how mentors and trainees also need to change in response to their mutual…

Lisa-Marie Schmid, first author of PUMPKIN, the sole Plastid UMP Kinase, Associates with Group II Introns and Alters Their Metabolism Current Position: PhD student in the group of PD Dr. Jörg Meurer, Leister lab, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, München, Germany Education: B.Sc. Biology and M.Sc.…

Plants encounter myriad invaders, including bacteria, fungi, insects, and other parasites. These pathogens generally deliver effector proteins into plants, increasing their virulence and targeting various host processes (Toruño et al., 2016). Although advances in the past two decades have led to significant…

The soil-borne pathogen Plasmodiophora brassicae can infect most members of the Brassicaceae family. The infections, which can lead to extensive crop losses, typically involve development of galls in the underground tissues of the plant, giving the pathogen its common name, ‘clubroot’. Although…

Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is a potent inhibitor of cytochrome c oxidase, a conserved component of the respiratory electron transport chain in all aerobic life. Thus, HCN is well suited to serve as a broad-spectrum chemical defense, and indeed it plays such a role in many interactions between plants and…

Plants devote more than 70% of their available nitrogen to maintaining chloroplast function (Makino and Osmond, 1991). During senescence or under stress conditions, chloroplasts are degraded and their constituent components are recycled. Chloroplasts can be degraded through at least three pathways: (1)…