Organelles, such as the chloroplast and nucleus, are structures with specific functions within a plant cell. It has been reported that many related, or homologous, proteins function in different organelles. However, how and why organellar proteins have diverged over evolutionary time remains unclear. Here, Costello et al. find that there has been continual change in […]
The transition of plants from water to land is one of the most momentous shifts in the history of life on Earth. 500 million years ago, the first land plants dramatically changed the environments on the planet, creating soils, rivers and the oxygen-rich atmosphere. However, the factors that enabled early plants to make the move […]
Multicellularity has arisen independently many times across the eukaryotic tree of life (e.g., in plants, animals and fungi). Comparisons of green algae with land plants is likely to identify the genetic toolkit of multicellularity as well as the colonization of terrestrial habitats. Here, Liang et al. present the genome and transcriptome of the single-celled charophyte […]
In vascular plants, new organs (e.g., leaves) are produced continuously from the shoot meristem, a process coined indeterminacy. The sister lineage of vascular plants, bryophytes, develop differently, ending with the formation of a determinate spore-bearing shoot (sporangium). The genetic underpinning of indeterminacy is well understood in vascular plants, but the mechanisms enabling the transition from […]
In the flowering plant order Caryophyllales (which includes beets), betalains substitute for anthocyanins, which are the most common form of pigmentation across the land plant phylogeny. Also found in the Basidiomycota fungal lineage, betalains are tyrosine-derived pigments that comprise of two groups of compounds, betaxanthins (yellow) and betacyanins (violet). Anthocyanins have never been detected within […]
Revolutions in omics technologies have rapidly increased the number of plant genomes, transcriptomes and proteomes available. However, protein sequences need to be assigned a biological function to provide useful insights for comparative genomics and transcriptomics. Here, Schwacke et al present MapMan4, a tool to classify proteins and provide ontology information for omics data as well as […]
Understanding the origin and evolution of flowering plants is key to explaining the development of major terrestrial ecosystems. The rapid diversification of angiosperms into over 360,000 extant species was famously termed ‘an abominable mystery’ by Charles Darwin. Here, Li et al reconstruct the angiosperm phylogeny based on 80 genes from 2881 plant plastomes, providing the […]
Durum wheat cultivar Svevo (Triticum turgidum L. ssp. durum) is a cereal crop predominantly grown for pasta production. It is the result of multiple rounds of domestication, originally deriving from wild emmer wheat from the Fertile Crescent approximately 10,000 years ago. Here, Maccaferri et al. report the high quality genome of durum wheat, creating an […]
Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) is a carbon fixation pathway that reduces photorespiration and increases water use efficiency, enabling CAM plants to survive in inhospitable environments. The evolution of CAM on 35 independent occasions across angiosperms makes it a notable case study of convergent evolution. Here, Heyduk et al. perform transcriptomic and metabolomic analysis on a […]
Recent advances in genome sequencing have increased our understanding of plant evolution and provided insights into factors affecting agriculturally important traits (e.g., yield, stress tolerance). There is an impetus to increase the quantity and quality of genomes publically available with around 350 of the 391,000 vascular plant species having received sequencing. Here, Liu et al. […]
Identifying methods to improve crop productivity is vital considering the devastating consequences of climate change (e.g., frequent droughts). Stomatal conductance influences photosynthesis and water use efficiency, which are two important indicators of crop yield. Here, Faralli et al. discuss advances in understanding how stomatal traits vary and how these may be manipulated to improve stomatal […]
Multicellularity has evolved independently many times in eukaryotes (e.g. land plants, fungi, animals). Predation is one driver that is hypothesised to lead to this evolution from unicellular ancestors. Here, using evolution experiments, Herron et al. demonstrate that the unicellular green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii develops multicellular structures under selective pressure of the predatory filter feeder Paramecium […]
The global population is estimated to rise by 2 billion by 2050 placing strains on major food crops. To sustainably feed future populations and reduce the environmental damage of intensive agriculture, crop yields must be improved without increasing the amount of cultivatable land. In this review, Simkin et al. discuss recent progress of increasing crop […]
Auxin, a plant hormone and major growth regulator, is fundamental for adaptations to climatic variation in shoots but its role in roots under elevated temperatures is more controversial. PIN-LIKES (PILS) 2, 3 and 5 proteins have previously been identified to restrict nuclear auxin signalling but the role of PILS6 is less studied. Here, by developing […]
Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has transformed our understanding of gene expression within and amongst individual cells. These techniques have been applied extensively to animal cell populations to discover the development of specific cell lines and identify rare cell types but are not commonly used in plant biology. The study here presents high-throughput scRNA-seq data […]