In the grass family (Poaceae), the subfamily Pooideae, which includes economically important species like wheat, barley and forage grasses like ryegrass, dominates cold temperate habitats, although the ancestors of this group probably were adapted to tropical climates. Schubert et al. investigated the evolution to cold acclimation in the Pooideae subfamily. A cold acclimation followed by […]
Understanding mechanisms for assembly of plant communities involves estimating different interactions among coexisting species, and how environmental change might affect those interactions. Peréz-Ramos et al. address how functional traits and their plasticity relate to the mechanisms that allow species to coexist. They studied ten annual species under two contrasting water availability conditions (control and drought). […]
Little is known about the stimuli that regulate time intervals for new leaves production (plastochrone) at the shoot apical meristem (SAM). Oxygen is a diffusible molecule with potential to regulate this process. The use of a micro-scale Clark-type oxygen electrode allowed Weits et al. to measure oxygen at the SAM. A low oxygen niche was […]
In bread wheat, the VERNALIZATION 1 (VRN1) gene is induced after cold exposure and short days, promoting flowering. In some species the vernalization effect of cold temperature can be lost or reversed after a short exposure to a high temperature (∼35°C); this process is referred as de-vernalization. Very little is known about this response or […]
Regulation of flowering in time and space in perennials like Arabis alpina involves two systems. One uses orthologs to FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) from A. thaliana; in A. alpine is called PERPETUAL FLOWERING 1 (PEP1) and its repression enables flowering after vernalization. The other system uses microRNA156 (miR156), which allows the flowering response after vernalization […]
There are more than 7 million crop accessions in gene banks around the world, however the information records for them are in multiple formats, making a comparison between and within collections difficult. Extrapolating from a new paper by Milner et al. (Nature Genetics 51: pages319–326) Langridge and Waugh suggest a framework to efficiently utilize this […]
Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) represses the expression of its gene targets epigenetically and VERNALIZATION 2 (VRN2) is a subunit of the PRC2 complex in Arabidopsis. The PRC2-VRN2 complex, among other roles, regulates flowering after long cold exposure. Gibbs and coworkers identified VRN2 as a possible target for the N end rule pathway, since it […]
Schaefer and colleagues have developed Camoco (Co-analysis of molecular components), which integrates data from GWAS and co-expression networks to identify high confidence candidate genes associated with a phenotype of interest. To evaluate the program they used GWAS and co-expression data from maize. They used gene expression data from three datasets: data from whole-seedling transcriptome from […]
Previous reports have shown that M. polymorpha DNA methylation status varies during its life cycle and it contains only one copy of the METHYLTRANSFERASE1 (MET1) orthologous gene. MET1 is responsible of CG methylation in angiosperms. Ikeda and collaborators generated MpMET mutants using the CRISPR/CAS9 system. The mutants showed abnormal shape, growth delay, reduced size and organs for asexual and sexual […]