Archive: May, 2024

Conferences serve as vital platforms for dissemination of research findings, networking, establishing collaborations, and facilitating professional development across various fields. However, most conferences have failed to prioritize inclusivity due to participation barriers and unequal representation.…

A review of the past 50 years of plant immunity by Jones, Staskawicz, and Dangl? Yes please! I particularly enjoy historical perspectives of a discipline, as they frame conceptual breakthroughs with the benefit of hindsight. As the article lays out, understanding the plant immune system benefitted greatly…

Plants possess a fascinating ability to communicate with each other through a complex system of chemical signals. Aboveground, they use airborne volatile signals to attract predatory insects, prime defenses in neighbors, facilitate nutrient transfer, and promote plant interactions. However, less is known…

Widely and abundantly eaten tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) are delicious and nutritious, but the genetic diversity of cultivated tomatoes is quite narrow. In this review, Wang et al. give an overview of efforts to increase diversity, through introduction of genes from wild relatives and other approaches.…

Low-resolution data can provide broad strokes but miss the details that come from greater information density. When striving to understand the multimillion-year evolutionary history of the angiosperms, more data certainly helps. Here, by focusing on a subset of 353 genes, Zuntini and Carruthers et al.…

As one of the most traded commodities in the world, coffee has cultural and economic impact that spans continents. The main source of coffee beans, Coffea arabica (Arabica), is a polyploid species that resulted from the hybridization between diploid C. canephora (Robusta) and C. eugenioides (Eugenioides).…

The domestication of cultivated strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa) traces back approximately 300 years, providing us with a relatively comprehensive genealogy of this artificial hybrid species. Strawberry yield in the US has increased by 2,755% since the 1960’s, largely owing to the California strawberry…

In recent years, the discovery that the translational regulation of many mRNAs is influenced by small upstream open reading frames (uORFs) has highlighted the importance of precisely identifying gene structures and translated ORFs to understand gene functions and cellular behavior. Using Arabidopsis,…