PLOS Biol. Guard cell size is, in general, inversely related to stomatal density. It is advantageous for plants to maximize their photosynthetic capabilities by generating higher rates of gas exchange, thereby incorporating more CO2 to help drive this pathway. However, the number of cells that can occupy a given space is restricted, as defined by […]
Guest Editor: Dr. Amey Redkar Amey is a postdoc at The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich, UK and has been a Plantae Fellow since September 2017. He is working to understand the interaction of plants and pathogens during disease development. His current research which is funded by EMBO Long Term Fellowship focuses on pathogen Albugo candida, which […]
Note: This is the first post in a new series, “Self Reflection” organized by Amey Redkar written for (and largely by) early-career researchers – read more here. Every step in your career starts with a document to present yourself clearly and concisely, to crack the advertised placement. You may have already guessed that I am talking […]
Nat. Plants. The current rate of crop plant breeding, limited by the long generation time of crop plants, is insufficient to address the needs caused by the enormous increase in the human population accompanied by climate change. Watson et al. have recently presented a method called ‘Speed breeding’ which is based on increasing the period […]
Phytopthora sojae poses a serious threat to soybean production world-wide. This oomycete pathogen has a wide arsenal of effector proteins, some of which have been functionally characterized for their virulence role. Huang et al. characterized and demonstrated the functional role of an avirulence effector PsAvr3c in reprogramming the host RNA-splicing process. PsAvr3c is an essential […]
All phytopathogens encode for a toolbox of secreted proteins called ‘effectors’ that promote disease formation in the best possible way. Effectors are either acting in the apoplastic space or are translocated to the host cell to target diverse processes and modulate the host using enzymatic activities. Khan et al. have surveyed the effector literature from […]
The apoplast represents a highly interactive site for intercellular communication and transport in plant-microbe interaction, that determines whether a pathogen can successfully overcome the early stages of plant defense. This site is also a battleground for an important class of apoplastic effectors that are known to perform exciting functions. Current methods of predicted apoplastic proteins […]
Filamentous plant pathogens have developed an extra-ordinary level of dynamic genome architecture that adapts to changing host environment in the best possible way to promote infection. There are very limited studies describing the impact of this genome plasticity on phenotypic variation. Haueisen et al. have shown the effect of genome variability on infection phenotypes in […]
Water, a principal component on earth has also a fundamental role in maintenance of plants, microbes and the disease that is shaped by such interaction. Pathogenic disease outbreaks occur only in favorable environmental conditions, and atmospheric humidity is essential for pathogenesis. This review by Aung et al. provides a broad overview on the importance of […]