A protein’s function and localization are often studied by fusing to it a small “tag” to enhance visualization (through the tag’s fluorescence or antibodies that recognize the tag). These tags are often assumed to have little effect on the protein of interest, but as Hurst et al. show using several different tags fused to the […]
Wang et al. analyse data from the 3000 rice (Oryza sativa) genome (3K-RG) project, identifying “29 million single nucleotide polymorphisms, 2.4 million small indels and over 90,000 structural variations”. The data of course strongly support the two major rice types (Indica and Japonica), but also reveal a total of nine subpopulations. The authors use these […]
Most students learn that metabolism does not increase at the same rate as an animal’s size – an elephant eats much less per unit of body mouse than a mouse does. This non-linear scaling, described through metabolic scaling theory, also occurs in plants – the growth rate of large plants is relatively slower than that […]
Review: A newly proposed plastid: the xyloplast ($) In its simplest definition, a plastid is an organelle that manufactures and stores essential chemical compounds used by its host cell. Numerous plastids exist beyond the familiar chloroplast. Chromoplasts synthesise and store carotenoid pigments, and provide their hosts with district yellow, orange or red colouring, while amyloplasts […]
By Peter Ulvskov and Jesper Harholt For the first time in a very long time, a new polysaccharide is reported in plants. Roberts et al. (2018) discovered an arabinoglucan in the moss Physcomitrella patens. This discovery came about not as a result of biochemical characterization of the moss cell wall, but rather as a targeted […]
Toh et al. screened more than 20,000 chemicals from chemical libraries for compounds that regulate stomatal movement. They used Commelina benghalensis for their screen, as its stomata are about twice as large as those in Arabidopsis thaliana. They identified nine compounds that inhibited stomatal opening in the light, which they called SCL1 – 9, one […]
A bean leaf might not look big to us, but to a bacterium it is huge: authors Remus-Emsermann and Schlechter point out that in terms of scale, a microbe is to a leaf as a human is to the island of Trinidad. Like an island, a leaf has diverse inhabitants and provides diverse microhabitats. Much […]
The one sure-fire way to get children excited about plants is to show them how a Venus flytrap works. But how does it work? We’ve all heard that the trap “counts” the number times it is triggered, and that it requires two or more touches in quick succession to close – but how does it […]
Plants produce a wide range of polysaccharides in their cell walls, some of which are restricted to certain species. Roberts et al. investigated a moss gene encoding an enzyme that resembles a mixed-linkage (1,3;1,4)-β-glucan (MLG) synthase. When expressed in tobacco, this enzyme produces a novel unbranched, unsubstituted arabinoglucan (AGlc) polysaccharide that consists of both glucose […]