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 […]
Olive oil is a staple of the healthy “Mediterranean diet” and contains high levels of the monounsaturated fat oleic acid. Unver, Wu et al. present the genome of the wild olive tree (Olea europaea var. sylvestris) (draft sequences of domesticated olive trees without extensive functional annotation were reported previously). This new work also looks at […]
The N-end rule pathway is a conserved pathway for the control of protein turnover, through which the clipping or modification of amino acids from the amino-terminus of a protein leads to an interaction with PROTEOLYSIS 6 (PRT6; an N-recognin E3 ligase) and 26S proteasome-mediated proteolysis. Previously, hypoxia (low oxygen) and nitric oxide (NO) were shown to […]
Rice is one of our most important crops, and previous work has indicated that it was domesticated independently in Asia (Oryza sativa) and Africa (Oryza glaberrima). Using archeological approaches, Hilbert et al. for the first time show evidence for domestication of a rice species (Oryza sp.) in the Americas. From excavation sites in Brazil, the […]
Visual and other cues attract pollinators. Bees vision is skewed towards blue colors, but they also visit non-blue flowers. Moyroud et al. looked at how petal surface textures affect bee responses. The authors observed that similar parallel cuticular striations in diverse angiosperm lineages show convergent optical properties, and cause preferential scattering of short-wavelength blue and […]
One of the great questions of biology is how and why C4 photosynthesis pathway evolved independently more than 60 times. The advantages are obvious (increased productivity), but the underlying molecular predisposition to this transition remains poorly defined. Using a comparative transcriptomics approach involving the non-C4 relatives of C4 plants, Moreno-Villena et al. found that the […]