Archive: October, 2023

Bentham, De la Concepcion et al. fine-tuned a plant immune receptor pair to allow for engineering new specificities while avoiding autoactivation. https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad204 Adam R Bentham, Mark J Banfield Department of Biochemistry and Metabolism, John Innes Centre, Norwich Research…

Liu et al. identify two proteins that repress flowering by acting on the florigen activation complex. https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad190 Background: Timely flowering is critical for plant reproductive success. FLOWERING PROMOTING FACTOR1 (FPF1), a small protein without any known domains, has…

This review by Cui et al. makes the interesting comparison between the developmental processes involved in root nodule formation and haustoria formation by roots of parasitic plants. As the authors observe, both are organs that are produced for the purpose of nutrient acquisition through “intimate…

Without doubt, Arabidopsis thaliana has thoroughly demonstrated its usefulness as a model species. In this interesting article by Mabry et al. (with an impressive author list!), the authors propose to expand the Arabidopsis toolkit to encompass its entire order – its family of families, the Brassicales.…

Plants are closely associated with large numbers of microbes that live in, on, and around them; these are collectively called the plant microbiota. Microbes can be pathogenic, neutral, or beneficial. Beneficial microbes might enhance nutrient uptake by the plant or suppress pathogenic microbes. There…

In this Letter to the Editor, Dr. Beronda Montgomery discusses umbrella trees (Musanga cecropioides) as metaphors for how to sustain progress after disruption, specifically the decision by the US Supreme Court to ban the use of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. Umbrella trees spring…

Genome wide association studies (GWAS) identify genomic loci associated with a specific trait. However, these loci often contain many genes, so selecting which to investigate further can be tricky. To improve this Whitt, et al. developed a program called FiReMAGE (filtering results of multi-species,…

Starch is synthesized in the chloroplasts of leaves during the day and degraded at night. BAM1 (β-AMYLASE 1) catalyzes starch degradation and interacts with the non-catalytic glucan phosphatase called LSF1 (LIKE SEX FOUR 1) and the plastid localised MDH (MALATE DEHYDROGENASE). However, we don’t fully…