Cataloguing of American plants started in the year 1526 with the chronicles by Fernandez de Oviedo that already included the first reports of now widely use crops such as chili pepper and corn. Ulloa-Ulloa et al. present in this article a complete and searchable checklist (large PDF) of all known American vascular plants, that includes […]
Apple (Malus spp.) is an economically important tree that faces, like other crops cultured in temperate regions, remarkable challenges due to climate change such as abiotic (drought and salinity) and biotic (fungi, bacteria and aphids) stresses. For that, there is increasing need to preserve Malus genetic resources (wild and commercial varieties) with potentially valuable genes […]
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is today the main model to study fleshy fruit development. Until now, most tomato growth and ripening studies are focused on a single tissue, the pericarp, and do not take into consideration the development of internal tissues. Shinozaki et al. provide an extensive spatiotemporal transcriptome analysis, with 24,660 unique genes detected, of […]
During 2017, a consortium of 200 German research institutions was in conversations with the publishing group Elsevier to achieve a collective deal for full online access to Elsevier journals. This deal would have granted them access to about 2.500 journals for half the market price. After they could not reach an agreement by December 2017, […]
Bamboos are economically important plants, with versatile applications including use in construction, paper, textiles and food production and bioenergy uses among others. Traditional methods of plant propagation are revealed to be challenging in this plant. First, bamboo propagation through seeds could be problematic, due to short seed viability, massive consumption by small animals and genetic […]
Woody plants, given their usually long life span, typically must face during their life several injuries that could take as long as several years to heal. In their work, Chano et al. use microarray analysis and RT-PCR to analyze the transcriptome changes that occurs during wood formation after a trauma in the conifer Pinus canariensis. Their results […]
Plant cell walls have recently been revealed as an essential factor of plant environment monitoring system, much more than just a passive defensive barrier as previously thought. In a recent work, Bacete et al. have reviewed how changes to plant cell wall integrity affect disease resistance. More specifically, how the impairment of cellulose biosynthesis, the […]
Plant pathogens have developed a large range of strategies to allow them to have successful interactions with their plant host, including physiological manipulation. For example, Pseudomonas syringae, the cause of speck disease in many plant systems, manipulates the auxin phytohormone physiology in its plant hosts. McClerklin et al. showed that P. syringae pv. tomato strain […]
Cytokinin is a phytohormone involved in many plant processes such as cell proliferation, apical dominance, leaf senescence, tissue patterning, organ initiation, environmental responses… To allow for effective control of all these processes, cytokinin concentrations need to be continuously adjusted. One such control mechanism is the irreversible degradation of cytokinin controlled by CKX (cytokinin oxidase/dehydrogenase) […]