Steve Jacobsen’s group has been developing a broad range of synthetic biology tools to interrogate DNA-methylation in plants (see Gallego-Bartolomé et al., 2018, and Gallego-Bartolomé et al., 2019). Among them, they use the CRISPR-Cas9 SunTag system, in which the dCas9 protein is fused to SunTag, a repetitive peptide epitope. In combination with a guide RNA, […]
Plants can adjust their shape, size and number of organs, grow according to gravity and light, and regenerate damaged tissues, through the action of the plant hormone auxin. Another versatile signal comes from Ca2+, which is a crucial second messenger for many cellular processes during responses to a wide range of endogenous and environmental signals. […]
Light perception in plants generates a plethora of gene expression changes. Among them, it has been shown that light affects alternative splicing mediated by a chloroplast retrograde signal. Here, Godoy Herz et al. explore the different possible mechanisms possible involved in this regulation. Using either pharmacological inhibitors or an Arabidopsis mutant in histone deacetylation, they […]
Previously, Monte et al. showed that the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha perceives the jasmonate pathway precursor dn-OPDA instead of the well known JA-Ile phytohormone of vascular plants. Now, Monte and colleagues focus on the MpJAZ, downstream of the signal transduction pathway. MpJAZ is the sole ortholog in Marchantia to the 13 JAZ genes of Arabidopsis. In […]