There is probably not a plant scientist on the planet who has not heard of AlphaFold (Jumper et al., 2021). Many of you reading this have likely used it. What began as DeepMind’s attempt to apply artificial intelligence to one of biology’s longest-standing problems became a breakthrough that gave…

Plantae Presents: The Benefit of Scientific Societies for Undergraduates to PIs Featuring Catrina Adams, Jennifer Hartley, Dior Kelley, Amy Newell, and Kaitlin Saward   When: Wednesday, June 24, 2026, at 8:00 AM PDT | 11:00 AM EDT | 4:00 PM BST | 11:00 PM Beijing About this Webinar Many plant…

Our food crops are threatened by ever-increasing environmental challenges as a consequence of climate change. It’s critical that we develop strategies to monitor and mitigate these stresses, but it’s also a huge undertaking. A new focus issue in Physiologia Plantarum provides a set of articles that…

There are numerous ways that AI can support research productivity through its ability to evaluate large datasets. Plant Communications has assembled a collection of articles that describe some of these new tools and approaches. As an example, Jang et al. describe the use of digital twins as tools to…

Compared to their aquatic relatives, early land plants faced many challenges, such as a lack of buoyancy, harmful UV light, the challenge of nutrient uptake, and the need to avoid desiccation. In a fascinating review (part of the Plant Physiology focus collection on early land plant evolution), Domozych…

Plants continuously monitor their environment through sophisticated defense systems that recognize microbe-associated molecular patterns and activate immune responses. Among the diverse signaling molecules involved, peptides have emerged as an important molecular language that coordinates communication…

Genome editing has rapidly transformed biology, and Cas9 remains the most widely used tool for making targeted changes in DNA. Recently, a new AI-designed editor called OpenCRISPR-1 (OC1) which differs from prototypical SpCas by more than 400 amino acids has shown promise in human cells. Das and colleagues…

The mechanisms by which plants switch between growth and stress survival remain somewhat enigmatic. Following on from previous studies, Gong et al. revealed that the conserved N-terminal acetyltransferase B (NatB) helps regulate this balance. Arabidopsis mutants lacking the catalytic subunit of NatB,…