Entries by Mary Williams

Applications open for 2017-2018 Plantae Fellows

Are you a creative, articulate and web-savvy plant scientist looking to connect with other like-minded folks? We need your help to nurture and grow Plantae, the online community for the global plant science community.  We are looking for individuals who are interested in being highly engaged contributors by curating content and facilitating discussions. The benefits […]

Harnessing the hidden genetic diversity for improving multiple abiotic stress tolerance in rice

Ali et al. describe a rice breeding strategy to improve abiotic stress tolerance as well as to accelerate the speed to achieving homozygosity. The researchers named this particular technique as “Green Super Rice” (GSR) breeding technology. They use a backcross (BC) breeding approach to fix breeding lines which are tolerant of multiple abiotic stresses and […]

Interrupting long nights by short pulses of light accelerates flowering in wheat

In order to address the knowledge gap in the mechanisms of photoperiodic induction of flowering by phytochrome, Pearce et al. studied flowering behavior in wheat grown under short days, with the interruption of the long nights by short pluses of light (night breaks). Their study showed that night breaks accelerate flowering, and also demonstrated that […]

Root traits confer grain yield advantages under terminal drought in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

This study by Ramamoorthy et al. showed that survival of plants under drought conditions is not a sufficient goal for breeding. Rather,  yield for biomass and food production under water deficit is a better target. Chickpea genotypes having better root growth and higher root density showed better grain filling, and produced good yields in these studies.  […]

For drought tolerance, is water use efficiency (WUE) no longer a recommended selection criteria for energy crops?

Podlaski et al. conducted experiments with energy crops like miscanthus, prairie cordgrass, willow, etc, and report that  water use efficiency (WUE) is no longer a valid trait for selecting energy crops for drought tolerance. They could not find any significant relationship  between  WUE  and  biomass  yield. However, they found a positive correlation between  soil water […]

Variable mesophyll conductance among soybean cultivars sets a tradeoff between photosynthesis and water-use-efficiency

An experimental study by Tomeo and Rosenthal with soybean cultivars  demonstrated that there exists genotypic differences in mesophyll conductance (gm),  and that the potential exploitation of this trait may increase crop productivity. It was found that there exists a proper coordination mechanism between  gm and the physiology of leaf photosynthesis. The gm which alters the CO2 […]

TAL effector driven induction of a SWEET gene confers susceptibility to bacterial blight of cotton

Plants undergo photosynthesis in leaves to produce carbohydrates sucrose and starch. The sucrose is transported to other parts of the plants via sugar transporters called SWEET proteins. In addition, certain plant pathogens activate SWEET genes to invade their host. As shown in this paper, during bacterial blight of cotton (BBC) disease, in cotton GhSWEET10 is […]

Elevated temperature drives a shift from selfing to outcrossing in the insect-pollinated legume, faba bean (Vicia faba)

The effects of climate change on agriculture to human health have been well discussed in both scientific and public domains. In plants, changes in climate might affect interactions between the plants and their insect pollinators due to variable availability of pollinators in severe weather conditions, thus affecting reproductive success of plants and crop yield. In […]

A plant cryptochrome controls key features of the Chlamydomonas circadian clock and its life cycle

Animals and plants have divergent sets of blue light receptors, called Cryptochromes. However, green alga Chlamydomonas has both animal-like and plant cryptochrome (pCRY). The presence of multiple cryptochrome suggests specific roles in different pathways in respective organisms. In this paper, Müller et al explore the biological functions of pCRY using a mutant with reduced pCRY […]