Entries by Ileana Tossolini

Review: Unlocking plant genetics with telomere-to-telomere genome assemblies

The era of complete telomere-to-telomere (T2T) plant genomes is finally here! Recent advances in long-read sequencing technologies have revolutionized genome assembly, giving rise to gapless T2T assemblies and offering unprecedented insights into genome organization and function. Why are T2T genomes so important? These assemblies provide a comprehensive, end-to-end view of a genome, covering all coding […]

SAM-seq: A novel approach for unraveling plant epigenetic complexity

The complex interplay between nucleosome positioning, DNA methylation, and chromatin accessibility is crucial for genome regulation in eukaryotic organisms. However, current chromatin profiling methods, which rely on short-read sequencing, fail to characterize highly repetitive genomic regions and cannot detect multiple chromatin features simultaneously. In a recent study, Leduque et al. addressed these challenges by introducing […]

Spatial co-transcriptomics reveals discrete stages of the arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis

In recent years, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and single-nuclei RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) techniques have revolutionized plant biology by enabling the identification of novel cell types, modeling developmental trajectories, and analyzing transcriptional activity at the cellular level. However, these methods lack spatial context upon cell dissociation from tissues. Spatial transcriptomics (ST) overcomes this, preserving positional data […]