If you’ve ever conducted a germination experiment, you’ve probably asked yourself: what causes seeds to germinate at different times? The most obvious answer would be to point to genetic differences, but this phenomenon also occurs in genetically identical seeds. In this exciting paper, Sharma and Majee bring us a comprehensive review of the different physiological […]
Different breeding programs worldwide have developed various cultivars that can cope with changing and increasingly unpredictable environments while meeting market needs. These developments have brought a new challenge: creating tools to distinguish such varieties and trace their genetic purity. Using 40 wheat cultivars grown in Romania, Vasile and collaborators show that Simple Sequence Repeat markers […]
As the effects of climate change become increasingly severe and evident, there is growing concern about the future of food production. However, unlike its impact on crop yields, there is little clarity on the effects of climate change on the foundation of most agricultural systems: seed production and quality. In this paper, Maity and colleagues […]
The pressing need to restore degraded areas has led to an unprecedented demand for native seeds. However, seeds are not always available in sufficient quantity and quality in nature, so some restoration practitioners might opt to source their seeds from wild plants grown on farms, just like any crop. While this practice has great potential […]
Smoke is a crucial germination trigger in ecosystems with naturally recurring fires, such as savannas and Mediterranean forests. There are various compounds in smoke, yet karrikins (KARs) –the primary product of cellulose combustion– have dominated the research efforts to elucidate the mechanisms behind smoke-promoted germination. In this piece, Cao and collaborators draw our attention to […]
Climate change profoundly impacts plant communities, for example, by changing the geographic range of some species and locally extinguishing others. Yet these changes take time, maybe a few years, to be observed. This lag between climate and plant communities changes could result from the soil seed bank (i.e., the reserve of viable, ungerminated seeds in […]
Seeds not only carry the embryo that will germinate and give rise to a new individual, but they are also the vector to the next generation for microorganisms from the mother plant and the environment. Consequently, seeds link the microbiome between plant generations. In this thorough review, Abdelfattah and colleagues take us on the journey […]
Physical dormancy is imposed by an impermeable seed coat that prevents water uptake. For germination to occur, this coat must be broken. Fire passage, for example, breaks physical dormancy in ecosystems where such events are recurrent. However, the mechanisms behind how fire achieves this has yet to be explored. Fatty acids (FAs) influence seed coat […]
One of the current challenges in seed conservation is identifying the genetic basis that defines how long seeds can be stored before losing viability. This challenge is exceptionally crucial for rice, a cereal that feeds roughly half of the world’s population. However, most studies looking for determinant genes for seed longevity use warm and moist […]