It’s 2025, and although we live in a world saturated with information, is increasingly difficult to sort fact from propaganda or fiction. This is true in all arenas, including plant science. Calls for strategies to improve crop yields are sometimes met with criticisms that higher yielding crops would only serve “big ag” or further harm […]
For living organisms, proper control of element location is just as important as the control of enzyme location, but harder to study. A new study by Ramakrishna et al. uses an exciting new technology, cryo nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry ion microprobe, to investigate elemental distribution (measured by their major isotopes) in Arabidopsis and rice […]
Domesticated plants and animals are remarkable human achievements but were achieved with rather blunt instruments. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that some of the genes and alleles that passed through the population bottlenecks and artificial selection process are deleterious. Glaus et al. looked at several tomato wild species, land races, and […]
Single cell mutiomics are radically changing our understanding of pretty much every cellular process. Here, Nobori et al. integrated single-cell transcriptomic, epigenomic and spatial transcriptomic data to investigate plant responses to pathogens. The authors used three different strains of Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000; the wild-type (referred to as DC3000) which causes disease, and two […]
Review. Unraveling plant-microbe interaction dynamics: Insights from the Tripartite Symbiosis Model Plants naturally interact with a diverse array of microorganisms, which influence their fitness in various ways. However, understanding these plant-microbe interactions and applying the knowledge in real-world agricultural systems has been challenging. Most experimental research focuses on bipartite systems, where a single plant species […]
One of the great dilemmas of science is the fact that nitrogen gas, though very abundant in the atmosphere, is limiting for most forms of life. Of course, this lack of availability is because N2 gas has an extremely strong triple bond holding the two nitrogen atoms together; it’s so strong that N2 gas is […]
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 […]