The January 2025 issue of Plant Physiology has a focus on “Hypoxia and Plants”. This field has made a lot of progress recently in understanding plant responses to low oxygen, from the molecular to physiological and developmental levels. The focus issue includes reviews on topics such as divergent responses of rice to flooding, how cells […]
Special issue: Parasitic plants Runo, Wicke, and Thorogood have edited a special issue of Plants, People, Planet on the topic of parasitic plants. It’s nice to see a collection of articles that focus on a phylogenetically diverse collection of plants that share an unusual life trait, the ability (or requirement) to parasitize other plants. The […]
In this exciting paper, Zhang, Luo, Marand et al. combined several powerful techniques to investigate the program underlying soybean seed development. They used RNA sequencing to profile gene expression from single nuclei (snRNA-seq). They also carried out single-cell sequencing of assays for transposase-accessible chromatin (scATAC-seq) to identify accessible chromatin regions (ACR), which are potentially regions […]
It seems that there is no end to the surprises that RNA provides. To the old-school trio of mRNA, tRNA, and rRNA, the past 20 years have added miRNA, siRNA, tasiRNA and others, all with unique and specific roles in regulating gene activity. More recently, evidence has been accumulating that demonstrates non-cell autonomous RNA activities […]
Focus Issue: Hypoxia and Plants The January 2025 issue of Plant Physiology has a focus on “Hypoxia and Plants”. This field has made a lot of progress recently in understanding plant responses to low oxygen, from the molecular to physiological and developmental levels. The focus issue includes reviews on topics such as divergent responses of […]
Anthropogenic climate change has introduced tremendous uncertainty about the future of all life on Earth. As primary producers, threats to plants are transduced up the food chain to their consumers, including people, which is why there is a great need to develop resilient plants that are able to sustain us in spite of these new […]
When form fits function: the value of root diversity to survival For a plant, form is function. Despite the diversity of forms that exist in nature, plant root diversity is notoriously understudied compared to their aerial counterpart. This review by Ramachandran and Ramirez et al. aims to revitalize the field of root form-function research by […]
This interesting article by Cathie Martin and Eugenio Butelli describes the process through which purple, anthocyanin-accumulating tomatoes were brought to the US market, from idea to business plan to regulatory status review and finally direct-to-consumer sales. Although these tomatoes have demonstrated health benefits, the developers had difficulty finding partners who wanted to help commercialize them, […]
Review: Bringing purple tomatoes to market This interesting article by Cathie Martin and Eugenio Butelli describes the process through which purple, anthocyanin-accumulating tomatoes were brought to the US market, from idea to business plan to regulatory status review and finally direct-to-consumer sales. Although these tomatoes have demonstrated health benefits, the developers had difficulty finding partners […]