Entries by Mary Williams

Speed breeding: a powerful tool to accelerate crop research and breeding

Watson and Ghosh et al. describe protocols to accelerate the lifecycle of several crop species using “speed breeding”, which essentially involves extending the daylength to 22 hours with supplemental lighting. They describe methods and results from glasshouse and growth chamber speed breeding. In spite of greatly shortened generation times, seed production was similar for the […]

A lipid-anchored NAC transcription factor translocates into nucleus to activate GlyI gene expression involved in drought stress

Regulation of transcription factor (TF) localization is a common strategy for gene expression regulation. Wang et al. identified  a membrane-anchored TF, MfNACsa, as contributing to drought stress responses. In unstressed plants, MfNACsa is anchored to the plasma membrane through covalent-attachment of a palmitic group (a fatty acid) to a cysteine (known as S-palmitoylation). Upon drought stress, […]

Profile of Plant Cell Editor Keiko Sugimoto

Keiko Sugimoto, an Editor of The Plant Cell, was recently profiled by her undergraduate institution. Read more about The Plant Cell Editorial Board here. “At the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, the research team I lead as a Principal Investigator (PI) focuses on the two themes of “development” and “regeneration.” “Development” focuses on the […]

What We’re Reading: July 7

This week’s edition of What We’re Reading is guest edited by K.K. Sabu. Sabu is educated in the field of Plant Sciences and has working experience in plant genetics and genomics since 1995. His research interests include response of plants against environmental changes, natural variations in plant genetic resources and incorporation of genomics tools for […]

What We’re Reading: June 30th

This edition of What We’re Reading is guest edited by Mather A Khan, a Postdoc Fellow in the Mendoza Lab at Bond Life Sciences Center, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA. He is very much concerned about hunger, poverty, and global food security. His research is always been motivated by these factors. “Plant Science research always […]

iBiology – Magdalena Bezanilla: Understanding Cell Shape

Magdalena is a Reviewing Editor for The Plant Cell and a Professor at UMass Amherst. Here she describes her research interests in a series of videos published by iBiology.  A set of three video lectures, published by iBiology on May 2, 2017 Part 1: Understanding cell shape: Big insights from little plants: Polarized cell growth […]

Squeezing oil out of plants and into your gas tank: it’s hard

Here is a summary of new research published in The Plant Cell, written by Martin Vorel and published on the Michigan State University website. Sometimes, when a science experiment doesn’t work out, unexpected opportunities open up. That’s what Yang Yang and the Benning lab have found in their latest work on sustainable biofuels. When they […]

Direct and indirect visualization of bacterial effector delivery into diverse plant cell types during infection

Bacterial effectors are proteins produced by bacteria and introduced into their hosts, where the effectors support successful infection by the pathogen. Effectors can function in diverse cells and cell compartments, but many studies of effector localization have relied on overexpression systems which may have artifacts. Henry et al. used the GFP strand system to visualize […]