By Rumen Ivanov and David G. Robinson Our knowledge of vacuole biogenesis and the transport of proteins to the vacuole has advanced consistently over the last 30 years. In meristematic cells, the tonoplast appears to develop directly out of the endoplasmic reticulum (Viotti et al., 2013). Once it is established as a functioning organelle, tonoplast […]
Every year, genome assembly gets faster and cheaper. Li and Harkness provide a practical guide to today’s methods, with caveats and precautions that need to be considered at each step, even questions to ask before embarking on a sequencing project. Topics include how to estimate genome size and complexity, pros and cons of different sequencing […]
When you try to tip rocks out of a bucket, nothing happens until the steepness of the angle is sufficient to start them shifting (the “avalanche angle”). By contrast, water starts moving with even the slightest tilt to the bucket. Now think about the gravity sensing particles in plant cells, starch-rich statoliths, which are quite […]
Like all plant hormones, ABA controls diverse processes, including stomatal aperture and seed dormancy, and growth rate. Miao et al. have used CRISPR/Cas9 technology in rice to selectively mutant subsets of the 13-member PYL family of ABA receptors. They found notable differences when mutating group I (PYL1–PYL6 and PYL12) versus group II (PYL7–PYL11 and PYL13) […]
Xiao et al. used 1,033 rice accessions for GWAS to identify QTLs associated with cold tolerance. In general, japonica-type varieties showed greater cold tolerance than indica types. The authors identified many QTLs for cold tolerance at the seedling and booting (initiation of panicles) stages. They identified a locus correlated with cold tolerance, and a single-nucleotide […]
Review: A guide to sequence your favorite plant genomes Every year, genome assembly gets faster and cheaper. Li and Harkness provide a practical guide to today’s methods, with caveats and precautions that need to be considered at each step, even questions to ask before embarking on a sequencing project. Topics include how to estimate genome […]
Many pathogens produce virulence factors that improve their pathogenicity, including in some cases compounds produced by the host, such as the hormone cytokinin. Spallek et al. review the various plant pathogens — spanning from bacteria to parasitic plants — that use cytokinins as virulence factors; cytokinin biosynthetic and modification genes can be found in these […]
Khakhar et al. have developed a system by which genes can be made exquisitely responsive to specific hormones. They take advantage of the specificity of the guide DNA/Cas9 system, but use a deactivated (dCas9) enzyme that targets but does not cleave the target DNA. By fusing dCAS9 to a hormone-responsive degron (protein degradation domain) and […]
Sulfur is incorporated into the amino acid cysteine (Cys) and also the reactive-oxygen scavenger glutathione (GSH). Speiser et al. investigated the effect of restricting both Cys and glutathione production through a double-mutant analysis in Arabidopsis; sir1-1 is a slow-growing sulfite-reductase deficient mutant with limited production of Cys production, and cad2-1 is cadmium sensitive due to […]