Recent Posts

How do cucumber leaves respond to fruiting?

Dai et al. demonstrate the key function of a non-coding RNA delicately regulating cucumber fruit–leaf relationship By The research group led by Prof. Minmin Miao from Yangzhou University Background: For fruit-bearing crops, plants must allocate photosynthate from leaves to fruits. Most…

Building Your Professional Scientific Network

,
A network is defined as "an extended group of people with similar interests or concerns who interact and exchange knowledge for mutual assistance, support, and to increase learning" (Kools & Stoll, 2016). In the era of increasing tools, techniques, and ideas, it is challenging to work in isolation.…

Excitements and Hardships for New PIs in Plant Science

,
Starting and running a lab is an exciting and challenging endeavor for any new principal investigator (PI). Being a PI at a university carries the great responsibility of not only doing science, but also mentoring the next-generation of scientists. To provide first-hand insight into the experience of…

Review: Salt-tolerant crops: Time to deliver

Few topics are as inherently interesting from both fundamental and applied perspectives as salt tolerance in crop plants. From the basic science side, cells have several strategies that they use to keep Na+ levels low in their cytosol in spite of what can be a very steep concentration gradient from out…

Review: Temperature sensing in plants

Like all organisms, plants respond to changes in temperature by activating pathways that enable them to stay alive in spite of rising or lowering temperatures. Interestingly though, there is no universal temperature sensing mechanism across the domains of life. Changes in membrane fluidity (think of…