Desiccating leaves show increased ABA levels triggered by low turgor – right? Apparently not! The pressure chamber experiments showing increased ABA levels in desiccating leaves are inconsistent when the entire leaves are enclosed in the chamber. Sack et al. proposes that the turgor pressure is increased during the pressure chamber treatment, rather than decreased and […]
Dissecting the genetic controls of ABA is challenging, granted the complex modulation of ABA turnover and redundancy of the hormone perception machinery. In the recent study, Kalladan and colleagues explored natural variation of low-water-potential induced ABA accumulation. Using heuristic GWAS, followed by a reverse genetic screen, the team identified 116 ABA effector loci. The identified […]
Transposable elements are known to affect their neighboring genes, but they were so far unknown to affect the function of distant genes. Cho and Paszkowski observed a high level of transposon transcription expressed in rice. A transposon with root specific expression, MIKKI, was found to contain an imperfect binding site for miRNA171, which in turn […]