Polished white rice is a major food source for much of the world but is not a good source of the essential micronutrients iron and zinc. Like microbes, plants enhance their uptake of iron from the environment by synthesizing small “iron carrying” molecules called respectively siderophores or phytosiderophores (some of which are also carriers for […]
Many nutrients move through the plant body via the phloem. The developing embryo, which depends on the maternal plant for its nutrients, is not directly (symplastically) connected to maternal tissues, so nutrients must be exported across membranes to reach the embryo. PHO1 was identified previously as a phosphate exporter from roots cells into the apoplastic […]
Review: Outer, inner and planar polarity in the Arabidopsis root Despite vast differences across all living organisms, most eukaryotes display some form of cellular polarity which enables them to carry out specialized functions. The coordination of cell polarity within a single tissue layer is known as planar polarity. Nakamura and Grebe highlight the unique execution […]
Earlier this year I gave a Plantae seminar on “Images for Impact” – simple, free tips about how to source and create images to use in your science writing and communicating. Here is the text of the handout I created to accompany the seminar. You can get this as a PDF here. You can download […]
By Junmarie Soto-Burgos, Xiao-Hong Zhuang, Liwen Jiang, and Diane C. Bassham Autophagy, literally defined as “self-eating”, functions as a degradation process by recycling cytoplasmic contents under stress conditions or during development. Upon activation of autophagy, a membrane structure known as a phagophore forms and expands, finally closing to form a double-membrane vesicle called an autophagosome […]
By Elias Kaiser, Alejandro Morales, Jeremy Harbinson The environment of the natural world in which plants live, have evolved, and within which photosynthesis operates, is one characterised by change. The time scales over which change occurs can range from seconds (or less) all the way to the geological scale. All of these changes are relevant […]
Shendure et al. provide a superb review of how DNA sequencing technology has changed over the years and how these changes open up new applications. They start with the Maxam and Gilbert chemical cleavage and the Sanger “chain-termination” methods developed in the 1970s, and describe the scale-ups required for the draft completion in 2001 of […]
Chromosomes are long, and DNA sequencing reads have typically been short, meaning that it is necessary to assemble lots and lots of short reads by looking for overlapping sequences. This strategy is made more difficult in repeat-rich and transposon-rich regions of genomes, which characterize many plant genomes. The development of single-molecule sequencing like PacBio and […]
The current version of the Arabidopsis thaliana Col-0 reference genome, TAIR10, still has some gaps and mis-assemblies due to centromeres and repeat-rich regions. In another demonstration of the promise of single-molecule sequencing, Michael, Jupe et al. used a single nanopore flow cell to sequence the Arabidopsis thaliana accession KBS-Mac-74 in “four days at a cost […]