Cells are as small as life gets, but can be much larger than they appear if given room for expansion. This is possible with expansion microscopy, a technique that enables three dimensional cell imaging by physically expanding cellular components for visualization. Although expansion microscopy has been…

How can we precisely image plant tissues in super-resolution when approaching the optical limits of conventional microscopes? One solution lies in expansion microscopy, a technique that embeds tissue samples in an expandable hydrogel that proportionally increases the distances between structures, allowing…

With climate change, drought is expected to happen more frequently, making supplemental irrigation increasingly necessary to sustain crop productivity. One target trait to improve climate resilience is water use efficiency (WUE), defined by the ratio of carbon assimilation to water used by the plant.…

Light is a powerful signal, shaping plant development and growth. However, the cellular mechanisms that translate light signals into precise developmental responses are still being unravelled. The Arabidopsis hypocotyl (the embryonic stem, situated underneath the cotyledons in seedlings) rapidly restricts…

Brassinosteroids are plant hormones that play important roles in cell proliferation and expansion, but it is still unclear exactly what those roles are. Vukasinovic and colleagues show, in Arabidopsis thaliana root cells, that instrinsic brassinosteroid gradients signal anticlinal division. Single-cell…

In flowering plants, reproduction involves the alternation of two generations: the diploid sporophyte and the haploid gametophyte. Traditionally, the male gametophyte was thought to develop autonomously with minimal regulation by the sporophyte. However, recent research by Sivakumar, Pandey, and Ramesha…

FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) and TERMINAL FLOWER1 (TFL1), two members of the phosphatidylethanolamine-binding protein (PEBP) family, are well-known regulators of flowering time and inflorescence architecture in Arabidopsis thaliana. However, recent work by Bigas et al. uncovers their additional roles in regulating…

Review: Celebrating 150 years of Arabidopsis genetics The first known report of an Arabidopsis thaliana mutant appeared approximately 150 years ago (1873). In the intervening years, Arabidopsis has become an essential model for plant genetic research, driving groundbreaking discoveries across multiple…