Gamete formation in sexually reproducing plants begins with formation of a “mother cell” that undergoes meiosis to generate haploid spores. Haploid spores further develop into gametophytes within which gametes differentiate. In flowering plants (angiosperms), including crop systems, the female mother…

Eva Hellmann, The Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge, CB2 1LR Cambridge, United Kingdom [email protected] Phosphorus (P) is an essential plant nutrient and makes up part of membranes, DNA and RNA; it also serves as energy currency in the form of ATP cycling. It is involved…

The cell cycle is at the heart of processes such as cell division, fate acquisition and cell cycle exit towards differentiation. Decades of cell cycle research in animals and yeast have outlined the main components that control the cycle’s transitions, such as cyclins, cyclin-dependent kinases, E2F…

COVID-19 has derailed everyone’s lives and plans; 2020 is truly an “annus horribilis.” Yet clearly this pandemic has hit some harder than others. Note for example the greatly disproportionate mortality in Black and Indigenous populations, which surely contributed to the outpouring of outrage following…

The term “vitamin B1” indicates a family of molecules that includes thiamine, thiamine monophosphate and thiamine diphosphate (TDP). The latter is the most famous family member and plays a pivotal role in carbon metabolism. Thanks to an optimized detection protocol, Hofmann and colleagues have demonstrated…

How plants transcriptionally operate developmental programs and responses to stress in time and space has been an important question in plant biology. Fluorescent protein reporters are commonly used to address this question, but their performance is limited at short timescales (<30 min) before the…

Arabidopsis seeds consist of various tissue like seed coat, embryo, and endosperm. The endosperm provides the nutrient supplies to the growing embryo and has three domains namely, micropylar (surrounding embryo), chalazal (opposite end of the seed), and peripheral (in between micropylar and chalazal)…

During heat stress, heat shock transcription factors upregulate heat shock protein genes and give rise to the heat shock response (HSR) that occurs in the cytoplasm, while in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), the unfolded protein response (UPR) is also activated during heat stress. Both HSR and UPR cause…