Imagine you’re on a quest to deliver a package, racing against the competition. How do you prepare? Pollen grains and the pollen tubes that they form are essentially package-delivery systems. Their purpose is to deliver genetic information (sperm cell nuclei) to the ovule. Once the task is completed, the pollen cell itself becomes obsolete. A […]
The heat shock response, a rapid transcriptional response to heat, was first observed nearly 60 years ago, and has long been a paradigm for understanding gene responses to exogenous cues. The family of genes encoding heat shock factors (HSFs) is greatly expanded in plants. These HSFs serve as key regulators of the heat shock response, […]
Due to anthropomorphic global warming, 2024 was the first year during which the global mean temperature was more than 1.5° above pre-industrial levels. Clearly, understanding how high temperatures affect plant physiology is an urgent priority. In this new study, Zhang et al. did a multi-parameter study of the model C4 plant Setaria viridis. They grew two populations […]
It’s 2025, and although we live in a world saturated with information, is increasingly difficult to sort fact from propaganda or fiction. This is true in all arenas, including plant science. Calls for strategies to improve crop yields are sometimes met with criticisms that higher yielding crops would only serve “big ag” or further harm […]
For living organisms, proper control of element location is just as important as the control of enzyme location, but harder to study. A new study by Ramakrishna et al. uses an exciting new technology, cryo nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry ion microprobe, to investigate elemental distribution (measured by their major isotopes) in Arabidopsis and rice […]
Domesticated plants and animals are remarkable human achievements but were achieved with rather blunt instruments. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that some of the genes and alleles that passed through the population bottlenecks and artificial selection process are deleterious. Glaus et al. looked at several tomato wild species, land races, and […]
Single cell mutiomics are radically changing our understanding of pretty much every cellular process. Here, Nobori et al. integrated single-cell transcriptomic, epigenomic and spatial transcriptomic data to investigate plant responses to pathogens. The authors used three different strains of Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000; the wild-type (referred to as DC3000) which causes disease, and two […]
Review. Unraveling plant-microbe interaction dynamics: Insights from the Tripartite Symbiosis Model Plants naturally interact with a diverse array of microorganisms, which influence their fitness in various ways. However, understanding these plant-microbe interactions and applying the knowledge in real-world agricultural systems has been challenging. Most experimental research focuses on bipartite systems, where a single plant species […]
One of the great dilemmas of science is the fact that nitrogen gas, though very abundant in the atmosphere, is limiting for most forms of life. Of course, this lack of availability is because N2 gas has an extremely strong triple bond holding the two nitrogen atoms together; it’s so strong that N2 gas is […]