What if plants could teach us about aging? Understanding how and why living organisms age is a fundamental question in biology and medicine. While most research focuses on humans, the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana offers unique insights into how organisms age. In a recent study, Dai et al. analyzed first true leaves at various ages […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]