It’s easy for most of us to grasp how an enzyme evolves new functions or substrate specificities, but envisioning how something incredibly complex like the human eye can be quite challenging (even Darwin was stumped). In this fascinating paper, Chomicki et al. asked how two geographically separated carnivorous pitcher plants evolved the same complex trap […]
Review: A century of studying plant secondary metabolism—From “what?” to “where, how, and why?” Phytochemicals, also known as plant secondary metabolites, play primary roles in plant development, structure, and response to the environment. Their metabolism has been studied for over a century. In a new review, Dixon and Dickinson discuss past and recent advances in […]
Plants, like animals, have small populations of stem cells capable of differentiating into other tissues, but in plants these stem cell populations are even more long-lived and versatile. Stem cells in plants include the meristems (shoot and root apical meristems, inflorescence and axillary meristems) as well as the vascular cambium. Collectively, they produce all the […]
Review. Milestones in understanding phosphorus uptake, transport, sensing, use, and signaling Phosphorus (P) is an essential nutrient and critical component of nucleic acids, phospholipids, and other molecules. Yang et al. provide a historical (since 1996) overview of the processes controlling its uptake and use. Plants take up P from the rhizosphere primarily in the form […]
By Aida Maric, PhD, Plant Physiology Assistant Features Editor Jurriaan Ton is Professor of Plant Environmental Signalling at the University of Sheffield in UK. He obtained his PhD at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he studied plant-microbiome interaction in the lab of Prof. Corné Pieterse. After extensive international experience and after working as […]
This is an excellent article to wrap up this year and lead us into the future. Introducing a special issue of Plant Cell Physiology, Nakajima et al. summarize an exciting collection of papers that look at diverse ways that plant biology can be enhanced through “human-machine collaborations”. Some of these, like microscopes (machines that enhance […]
Auxin is a pleiotropic plant hormone with diverse functions, many of which are mediated through transcriptional reprograming. However, some auxin responses occur extremely rapidly, ruling out changes in transcription as a mechanism. In 2022, one of the components of an auxin receptor, F-box protein TIR1/AFB, was discovered to include an adenylate cyclase catalytic domain, suggesting […]
Much of our understanding of the molecular underpinning that control shoot architecture comes from studies of annual plants such as Arabidopsis, pea, and rice. This new work by Su et al. investigates shoot branching in a long-lived tree, silver birch (Betula pendula). They started with a naturally occurring bushy variant, which has a premature stop […]
Unlike legumes, which form symbiotic associations with nitrogen-fixing bacteria (diazotrophs), high-yielding cereal crops are usually supplemented with inorganic fertilizers that are both energetically and environmentally problematic. Some non-legumes can obtain nitrogen from associations with free-living diazotrophs, and several strategies are being pursued to optimize such associations. A major challenge is that in most of these […]