Review. Autophagy: The master of bulk and selective recycling A functioning cell depends upon the appropriate production of proteins and macromolecules. The other end of the process, degradation and removal, is just as critical and just as selective. Marshall and Vierstra review autophagy (“self-eating”) in plants, connecting early work in yeast to genetic, metabolomic and […]
Video Creation 101: Overview and Helpful Tips Recorded March 2018 About This Webinar: This webinar provides an overview of what it takes to create a short 1- to 2-minute video that communicates research findings to a lay audience. Areas covered include finding effective video editing software; outlining the creation process; and the nuances of scripting, […]
The Taproot podcast digs beneath the surface to understand how scientific publications in plant biology are created. In each episode, co-hosts Liz Haswell and Ivan Baxter take a paper from the literature and talk about the story behind the science with one of its authors. How to listen On a computer, the page introducing each […]
DNA repair is of course a crucial process, and many DNA repair enzymes are conserved across all domains of life. In humans, deficiency in the RecQ family of DNA helicase repair enzymes leads to premature aging and a predisposition to cancer. Previous studies have identified the RecQ family in Arabidopsis and rice. Wiedemann et al. […]
Three letters to Plant Physiology address the role of vesicles in auxin transport, discussing the evidence and conclusions from a recently published paper from three perspectives. Does auxin accumulate in endocytic vesicles? If so, how, and why? The Letters address both the methods used and the intrepetation of the study’s results. This link takes you […]
Rising atmospheric CO2 levels are causing wide-ranging climate abnormalities. Beerling et al. discuss ways to capture CO2 in soils through augmenting soils with crushed basalt, or silicate-rich wastes such as sugarcane mill ash. As the added rock weathers, it reacts with gaseous CO2 to release cations (Ca2+ and Mg2+) and alkalinizing bicarbonate ions (HCO3–), which […]
Put a plant into full darkness and it will gradually senesce, whereas as individually darkened leaf (IDL) will undergo radid senescence. Law et al. used transcriptomic and metabolomic methods to identify the metabolic responses of plants to these two conditions. In fully darkened plants, metabolism is generally suppressed and photosynthetic capacity retained, which is in […]
Lichen are quite special, as they don’t exist independently of their partnership. Lichen are composed of a fungal partner and a photosynthetic partner (the algal or cyanobacterial photobiont), and these partnerships have evolved independently many times. Spribille provides an overview of some of the many questions that remain unanswered in the study of lichen and […]