Entries by Mary Williams

Plant Science Research Weekly: January 19, 2024

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 […]

Go your own way: An Interview with Plant Physiology Monitoring Editor Jurriaan Ton, PhD

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 […]

Guanylate cyclase activity of TIR1/AFB auxin receptors in rapid auxin responses

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 […]

Tree or bush? It’s all in the hormones

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 […]

Diurnal switches in diazotrophic lifestyle increase nitrogen contribution to cereals

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 […]

Old reserves and ancient buds fuel regrowth of coast redwood after catastrophic fire

In recent years we have witnessed catastrophic fires throughout the world, including the redwood forests of California. Although these huge ancient trees are fire resistant, many have died due to the extreme heat generated by these recent fires. Here, Peltier et al. examined patterns of regrowth from burned trees. In a series of elegant studies, […]

Plant Science Research Weekly: December 15, 2023

Special issue: Human-machine collaboration in plant biology 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 […]

Review: Paternal imprinting in Marchantia polymorpha

Humans and flowering plants spend most of their lives in a diploid state with two copies of each chromosome in most cells, but to reproduce they produce haploid gametes through meiosis. By contrast, bryophytes (liverworts, hornworts, and mosses), spend most of their lives in the haploid state. They produce gametes through mitosis and differentiation, and […]