How would you feel if you developed a plant that is tolerant to a particular stress stimulus and found out that it can also tolerate another stress? Bettgenhaeuser and found that this happened when plant breeders developed barley varieties resistant to the powdery mildew disease (caused by the fungal…

Much of our understanding of plant immunity comes from studies of pathogens that infect mesophyll tissues, (e.g., Pseudomonas syringae). However, there are many pathogens that specifically invade vascular tissues (e.g., Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae; Xoo), which causes rice bacterial blight. In a recent…

Have you ever heard the terms ‘zoochauvinism’, ‘plant blindness’ or ‘plant awareness disparity’? Do you know that in a Twitter poll about 30% of the participants voted plants out of wildlife? Ever noticed how important documentaries like ‘Planet Earth II’ and ‘Our Planet’ prefer animals…

Review: A rulebook for peptide control of legume–microbe endosymbiosis Symbiotic associations with bacterial or fungal partners enhance nutrient uptake for most plants, and recent years have uncovered the very sophisticated means by which these associations are established and controlled. Peptides…

Dana Amira Dahhan, co-first author of "Proteomic Characterization of Isolated Arabidopsis Clathrin-Coated Vesicles Reveals Evolutionarily Conserved and Plant Specific Components” Current Position: PhD student at University of Wisconsin-Madison (Madison, WI,  USA) Education: Biochemistry, B.S.…

Giovanni Melandri, first author of "Can biochemical traits bridge the gap between genomics and plant performance? A study in rice under drought" Position: Postdoctoral Researcher, INRAE Bordeaux-Aquitaine, UMR 132 BFP, Villenave-d'Ornon (France). Education: PhD in Plant Physiology, Wageningen…

Li et al. found that SOG1, a functional homolog of mammalian p53, protects radicle growth when seeds accumulate DNA damage. By Jinchao Li and Weiqiang Qian, State Key Laboratory of Protein and Plant Gene Research and School of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China Background:…

Seungjun Shin, first author of "Early seed development requires the A-type ATP-binding cassette protein ABCA10" Current Position: Ph.D. student at the Laboratory of Plant Cell Biology, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, Korea Education: B.S., Pohang University of Science and Technology,…