Entries by Magdalena Julkowska

Review – A plane choice: coordinating timing and orientation of cell division during plant development (Current Opinion in Plant Bio)

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Asymmetric cell division is instrumental to development of specialized cells, while symmetric cell division underlies proliferative growth. The defects in cell division plane arise when transition between the G1 to S stage is accelerated, suggesting that the signals leading to division plane position are initiated in G1. Facette et al. summarizes the intrinsic and extrinsic […]

Rapid improvement of domestication traits in an orphan crop by genome editing (Nature Plants – $) 

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Orphan crops, like groundcherry (Physalis pruinosa), are regionally important but are not grown on large commercial scale as they never went through a breeding cycle. Precision gene editing techniques, such as CRISPR/Cas9, can alter the most important agronomic traits in relatively short time. Lemmon et al. targeted the Physalis orthologues of tomato self-pruning genes and […]

Members of the Arabidopsis FORKED1-LIKE gene family act to localize PIN1 in developing veins (J Exp Bot.)

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Vascular system is one of the adaptive features for terrestrial plants. Polar localization of PIN1 is essential for creating directional auxin flow, resulting in vein pattern formation. Mariyamma et al. propose that FORKED1 (FKD1) and its homologues control the PIN1 polar localization. The team identified eight FKD1-LIKE genes (FL1-8) in Arabidopsis, containing DUF828 and Pleckstrin […]

Structural analysis of HTL and D14 proteins reveals the basis for ligand selectivity in Striga (Nature Comm.)

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Strigolactones induce germination of parasitic plant Striga, which causes more crop loss in Africa than any other parasite. Karrakins are structurally related to strigolactones, yet they do not induce Striga germination. By studying the structure and substrate recognition of strigolactone and karrakin-binding proteins in Striga hermonthica, Zu et al. gained insight in high sensitivity of […]

De novo domestication of wild tomato using genome editing (Nature Biotech – $)

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Breeding of crops typically focuses on yield increase, and is accompanied with the loss the genetic diversity, reduced nutritional value as well as susceptibility to environmental stress. As many domestication traits exhibit simple Mendelian inheritance patterns, Zsögön et al. targeted known domestication loci in wild tomato, Solanum pimpinellifolium, using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology. Successful targeting […]

What We’re Reading: October 5

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Guest editor: Magdalena Julkowska  Magdalena is a PostDoc at King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST, Saudi Arabia) working with Prof. Mark Tester. Her main interests are (1) salt-induced changes in root-to-shoot ratio in Arabidopsis, (2) study the expression patterns in plants with enhanced sodium accumulation in their roots and (3) development of tools for data analysis based […]

Opinion: Best practice data life cycle approaches for the life sciences (F1000 Res)

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Producing data is costly, and with advances in technology, we are producing data with revolutionary capacity. However, we are also losing data at an astonishing rate, with around 80% of data being unavailable 20 years after publication. Griffin et al. provide guidelines, repositories and other resources that can be used by scientists to deposit and […]

Molecular basis of salt sequestration in epidermal bladder cells of Chenopodium quinoa

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The recent focus on quinoa is a result of not only its high nutritional value, but also its astonishing salt stress tolerance. Epidermal bladder cells (EBC) are suspected to be a cause of salinity tolerance by serving as salt dumping place. In order to identify molecular mechanisms underlying salt sequestration, Bohm et al. performed transcriptome […]

SHOU4 proteins regulate trafficking of cellulose synthase complexes to the plasma membrane (Curr. Biol.)

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Plant cell walls provide mechanical support and define the extent and direction of cell expansion. Regulation of cellulose synthase determines cell wall load bearing and involves the receptor like kinases FEI1/FEI2. To gain further understanding of cell wall integrity regulation Polko et al. performed a suppressor screen of fei1/fei2. The group identified SHOU4, encoding a […]