Pilostyles are only visible when their fruit and flowers erupt out of their host plants. The Conversation/Wikipedia Steve Wylie; Jen Mccomb, and Kevin Thiele, University of Western Australia In 1946, forestry officer Charles Hamilton found something unusual on a shrubby native pea plant growing in Mundaring, near Perth. The pea had strange knobs on […]
Abdellatif Bahaji, first author of Plastidial phosphoglucose isomerase is an important determinant of seed yield through involvement in gibberellin-mediated reproductive development and biosynthesis of storage reserves in Arabidopsis Current Position: Postdoctoral fellow at the Instituto de Agrobiotecnología, Navarra, Spain Education: PhD in Plant biology, Department of Plant Physiology, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain Non-scientific Interests: […]
Cells use a sophisticated sorting system to ensure that proteins get to the proper destination. Proteins that are supposed to stay in the ER carry special tags (KDEL or HDEL, recognized by the ERD2 receptor) that prevent them from being swept along with other proteins out of the ER and into the Golgi. Silva-Alvim et […]
Through a GWAS study, Yu, Xiong et al. previously identified a transcription-factor encoding gene, OsLG3, with alleles that contribute to increased grain length in rice. In this new work, Xiong, Yu et al. showed that the same alleles of OsLG3 that confers longer grain length also enhance drought tolerance. By surveying a panel of varieties, […]
Even without knowing a lot about parasitic plants, you can probably guess some of the insights that come from the first parasitic plant genomic sequence. Because parasitic plants get their nutrients from another organism (functionally, they become heterotrophic), you might expect they would gradually lose the genes needed for nutrient uptake and for photosynthesis. You […]
The maize genome is largely composed of transposable elements, which is one reason maize has been such a powerful genetic model. However, these transposons also mean that there is a great deal of genetic variability between inbred lines, which can contribute to heterosis (hybrid vigor). In a pair of papers, Sun et al. report a […]
The two classic approaches to introducing DNA into a plant’s genome are by harnessing Agrobacterium tumefaciens’ fascinating gene-transfer skill, or by shooting the new DNA into the cell using a “biolistic” (gun) approach. Because of Agrobacterium’s restricted choice of hosts, the biolistic method has been preferred for monocots. Traditionally, regenerants are characterized phenotypically and by […]
Forward-genetic, loss-of-function studies have been invaluable in identifying factors necessary for the formation of the root endodermis. Drapek et al. used an ectopic expression approach to identify factors that are sufficient to produce endodermal-like cells in different root regions. They found that the combination of the key transcription factor SHR and the peptide ligand CIF2 […]
The interaction between transcription factors WUSCHEL (WUS) and CLAVATA3 (CLV3) controls the size of the meristem. Although WUS is known to activate CLV3 expression, their expression domains don’t fully overlap, with CLV3 being restricted to the upper part of the meristem. Previously, in the multiple ham mutant (loss of function of HAIRY MERISTEM family) CLV3 […]