The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? Gao et al. argue that we should be more aware of the beneficial impacts of friendly protists that eat potentially harmful microbes in the rhizosphere (they deliberately exclude plant pathogenic protists in their discussion). Protists are a diverse paraphyletic group of mostly single-celled eukaryotes. Bacterivorous protists […]
Plants can die from a lack of oxygen (hypoxia), which contributes to the devastating losses caused by flooding. Iacopino et al. set out to develop a more specific method for detecting oxygen levels in plants, based on the mammalian Hypoxia Inducible transcription Factor HIF. HIF is hydroxylated by an oxygen-dependent enzyme, with the hydroxylated form […]
Properly functioning guard cells change size in response to myriad stimuli to control the passage of water and gasses through stomata. The change in volume is mirrored by changes in plasma membrane surface area, with membrane moving dynamically between tonoplast and plasma membrane as needed. Bourdais et al. have developed a high-throughput imaging method to […]
Opinion: Limits to tree growth and longevity ($) I think trees are awesome, and I mean that in the truest sense of the word. They dwarf us in height, and when we look at a tree that has lived for hundreds or thousands of years it is impossible not to think of that span in […]
Wei Zeng, first author of Modulation of auxin signaling and development by polyadenylation machinery Current Position: Ph.D. candidate, Key Laboratory of Plant Molecular Physiology, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China Education: M.S. in College of Life Sciences, Xinyang Normal University, China Non-scientific Interests: Music, movie, badminton Brief bio: During my Ph.D. […]
Renuka Kolli, first author of Oxa2b is crucial for proper membrane insertion of Cox2 during complex IV biogenesis in Arabidopsis Current Position: PhD student at the department of Biology I, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany Education: 2014 – M. Tech in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India; 2009 – B. Tech in […]
In the new Cell Biology issue of Current Opinion in Plant Biology, editors Haswell and Dixit have chosen to focus on quantitative cell biology, arguing that, “if seeing is believing, then measuring is knowing.” Topics of the issue’s reviews span parts of the cell (including cell wall, cytoskeleton, stromules), things cells do (including morphogenesis) and […]
Although mulicellularity, and so also development, evolved independently in animals and plants, there are nevertheless some striking parallels in the mechanisms used to coordinate these processes. Ten Tesschur compares four developmental processes in plants to similar processes that occur in animal development. As examples, root growth and lateral root prepatterning is compared to body axis […]
Wheat production demands huge inputs of nitrogen as fertilizer, with accompanying financial and environmental costs. Zorb et al. discuss several strategies by which to maintain wheat yields and wheat quality while decreasing N use and wastage. Some of these are agronomic, such as ensuring that the N applications occur at times that are optimal for […]