Orientation of cell division decides daughter cell fate and is fundamentally important for tissue patterning and morphology. For instance, asymmetric cell division leads to the generation of new cell types; in contrast, symmetric division produces cells with similar identity in a proliferative manner. Campos et al. studied proteins involved in tissue patterning in Arabidopsis thaliana […]
About you Describe your journey from student to newly appointed faculty I was an undergraduate at Cornell University, first in economics and later switching to biology. Then I went to UC-Berkeley for my PhD where I worked in Michael Freeling’s lab on maize and sorghum comparative genomics. When I graduated from UC-Berkeley I was fortunate […]
About you Describe your journey from student to newly appointed faculty I graduated from National University of Quilmes, Argentina, with a degree in Biotechnology. I then started my PhD with Dr Rodolfo Sánchez at IFEVA (Institute for Research in Physiology and Ecology), School of Agronomy, University of Buenos Aires. When I got my PhD degree, […]
Potassium is one of the major nutrients for plant growth and development. Plants have a well-studied potassium uptake system mediated by transporters and ion channels. Unfortunately, due to the chemical similarity of potassium and cesium, which is toxic for plant growth, cesium is able to to get into the plant system and eventually into our […]
This week’s Plant Science Research Weekly is guest edited by Arif Ashraf. He is a postdoc at Facette lab in the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his research focus is deciphering the asymmetric cell division during stomatal development. He is working as an ASPB ambassador, Plantae Fellow, Co-founder of Plant Postdoc Slack and science writer […]
Stomatal development has been studied thoroughly in the dicot model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, but stomatal development fundamentally differs between dicot and monocot for the subsidiary cells, a pair of dumbbell-shaped cells adjacent to the guard cell, formation. In this study, Wang et al., identified an EMS mutation, bzu2-1, in maize which lacks subsidiary cells and […]
ARF (Auxin Response Factor) transcription factor proteins contain three domains: an N-terminal DNA-binding domain, a variable middle region, and a C-terminal PB1 domain. Powers et al. found that ARF7 and ARF19 accumulate as large-order assemblies in the cytoplasmic region of mature root cells, but the cytoplasmic signal disappears in the actively dividing cells. They showed […]
About you Describe your journey from student to newly appointed faculty My academic path was not always straight forward. 15 years ago, I read in a magazine that doing bioinformatics will be the job of the future (which it is now!), and I decided to enroll in bioinformatics at the University of Tübingen. However, very […]
Part of the “Self Reflection” series by and for early-career researchers In the era of digital media, science communication has advanced in an unprecedented way. Several years ago, we used to subscribe printed magazines and journals. Scientists prefer to subscribe digital version of magazines, journals and blogs these days as it provides instant access. Digital […]