Mauricio Contreras, first author of Host-interactor screens of Phytophthora infestans RXLR proteins reveal vesicle trafficking as a major effector-targeted process Current Position: PhD Student at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK. Education: BSc in Biological Sciences from the University…

Dongjie Jia, first author of Genetic variation in the promoter of an R2R3−MYB transcription factor determines fruit malate content in apple (Malus domestica Borkh.) Current Position: Lecturer, College of Horticulture, Qingdao Agricultural University Education: 2014.09-2018.11, Ph.D., Pomology,…

Yang et al. show that nonspecific phospholipase C4-mediated sphingolipid remodeling regulates root growth in Arabidopsis in response to phosphate deficiency. The Plant Cell. https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koaa054. By: Xuemin Wang, Department of Biology, University of Missouri-St. Louis/Donald Danforth…

Light comes largely from above, and plants have evolved strategies to efficiently capture this light even when competing with other potentially shading plants. However, at a field-level, such competition may (and does) prevent plants from collectively maximizing light use efficiency, hence yield. In…

In maize (Zea mays), loss of function mutations in genes involved in starch biosynthesis characterize sweet corn varieties that have increased sugar content in the kernel. Specifically, lines carrying the shrunken2 (sh2) allele revolutionized the corn industry in Northern America in the last 50 years…

During domestication of maize, one of the favorable traits was meristem size. Understanding the genetic circuit of maize meristem development and engineering for crop productivity are important from an agricultural perspective. In this article, Lie et al. used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the promoter regions…

Proper organogenesis depends on the precise control of cell proliferation and differentiation. Cytokinin and auxin have emerged as key regulators of both these processes, where cytokinin promotes proliferation and synergistically with auxin fine-tunes the proliferation and differentiation rate. Years…

This is an engrossing paper. The authors start off with a simple mutant screen for abnormal root growth in rice seedlings, through which they identified three “long root” mutant alleles of a rice mutant in a gene encoding a histidine kinase, HK1. Careful analysis showed that the mutant roots fail…