Priya Voothuluru, first author of An in vivo imaging assay detects spatial variability in glucose release from plant roots Current Position: Research Associate, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee Education: Ph.D. University of Missouri 2012 Non-scientific interests: Keeping up with current affairs, watching cricket and tennis, being outdoors, baking Brief Bio-sketch: My […]
The great strides we’ve made in understanding how plants perceive their environment, from light to pathogens to nutrients, haven’t been matched with an understanding of what they do with all that information; how do so many inputs get integrated into a single or few responses? And how does the information processing integrate spatially across the […]
Of course plants need to communicate between their different parts, and our understanding of these crucial signals has been advancing rapidly. This issue of Plant Cell Physiology includes a set of papers highlighting recent findings. A meeting report by Kiba on the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Program in Green Natural Sciences (IGER) International Symposium […]
Zinc is an important micronutrient for plants and people. To better understand Zn uptake and homeostasis, Sinclair et al. used a transcriptomic approach to identify genes abnormally expressed in zinc-transporter mutants (hma2 hma4). In these mutants, Zn accumulates in roots but isn’t effectively transported to shoots. The authors found that MTP2 (encoding a metal transporter […]
Polyamines including spermine and spermidine are present in all eukaryotes and have diverse roles. In plants they have been implicated in responses ranging from abiotic and biotic stresses to grain filling. Tao et al. examined the function of OsPMS1, encoding a spermine synthase, through genetic methods including RNAi and overexpression approaches. Knocking out OsPMS1 leads […]
FT encodes a mobile protein that carries a flower-promoting signal to the shoot apical meristem. In most plants, the FT gene has duplicated and diversified. Mulki et al. investigated the function of FT3 (HvFT3) in barley. Prior work showed that overexpression of HvFT1 accellerated the initiation and development of flowers. By contrast, HvFT3 overexpression accelerated […]
Do you know the difference between a wine made from Pinot noir grapes and one made from Cabernet Sauvignon grapes? Most people can taste a difference, but to really understand the wines you might want to go a bit deeper through metabolomic and transcriptomic approaches, as done by Fasoli et al. (in a project funded […]
Cell surface pattern-recognition receptors (PRRs) such as FLS2 that recognize conserved pathogen features are important contributors to plant defenses against pathogens, triggering the so-called Pattern-Triggered Immunity (PTI) response. Pattern recognition by PRRs triggers the production of extracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS), which both promotes additional defense responses and can help to weaken or kill the […]
Sometimes the plant is a relatively passive host upon which other organisms engage in dynamic interactions. Chen et al. showed that a wheat head-associated bacterium, Pseudomonas piscium, produces antifungal compounds that inhibit the growth of a plant pathogenic fungus, Fusarium graminearum. The authors started by culturing more than 12,000 bacterial isolates, from which they found […]