Plants may appear to be sitting ducks to whatever pest, pathogen or bad weather assaults them, but they are far from defenseless. In fact, plants are artful masters of war, armed with elaborate physical and chemical defense systems. But, in many cases, optimizing growth and defense is like running a…

In Arabidopsis thaliana and related species within the Mustard family (Brassicaceae), the tryptophan (trp)-derived antimicrobial metabolite camalexin (3-thiazol-2-yl-indole) plays a central role in defense against bacterial, fungal, and oomycete pathogens. Upon pathogen attack, cytochrome P450 monooxygenases…

Parsons et al. successfully separate early to late Golgi cisternae to reveal the sequential localization of resident proteins and the sequence features that guide transmembrane proteins within the Golgi stack. Plant Cell https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.19.00081 By Harriet T. Parsons (University of Cambridge)…

The ASPB Conviron Scholars program serves as a foundation for a career in plant science. The scholarship consists of the four major themes: Career Planning, Writing and Communications, Leadership, and Effective Presentations  Within each theme, the participants read collections of articles,…

Kevin Goslin, first author of Differential N-end rule degradation of RIN4/NOI fragments generated by the AvrRpt2 effector protease Current Position: Postdoctoral researcher, Plant Developmental Genetics, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland Education: PhD in Maynooth University, MSc in Trinity College,…

It’s hard to believe that when I was a student we were taught that “plants don’t have peptide hormones”. Since then we’ve discovered many diverse families of plant peptide hormones (see the Teaching Tool on peptide hormones for an excellent overview). Here, Kaufmann and Sauter review one family,…

Here’s an interesting question: Without human intervention, why would one find a dense stand of plants, growing in rather nutrient-rich soil? Perhaps you recognized that these conditions suggest seed dispersal by endozoochory, which involves passage through an animal's digestive tract. Spengler and…

Plant development is characterized by a high degree of plasticity in response to light. Light‐activated plant photoreceptors bind and inhibit the E3 ubiquitin ligase COP1, thus protecting downstream transcription factors from degradation. However, the detailed mechanisms of how COP1 can function between…