The May 2025 issue of The Plant Cell has a focus on Arabidopsis and how this simple model plant has had an outsized impact on our understanding of pretty much everything botanical (and beyond). Alongside several articles highlighting this impact, this review by Roeder et al. features eight short vignettes on topics that do not […]
Plant biologists are critical players in the pursuit of crop enhancement and other real-world solutions to today’s pressing problems, yet few of us know how to translate our research into tangible economic or social benefits. This useful and engaging article by Jonathan Napier walks us through the many steps and obstacles along the journey from […]
Single-cell technologies have brought our understanding of complex tissues to whole new levels. Previous methods showed how gene expression in tissues changes over time or after challenges, whereas now these patterns can be assigned to specific cell types, revealing intricate, elegant processes. Here, Zhu and Hsu et al. examined rice root responses to heterogenous soil […]
We all know that a healthy body requires a diet rich in fruits and vegetables., yet the vast majority of people living in the US don’t eat the recommended daily amounts of these plant foods. This deficit, and the accompanying over-reliance on grain-based and ultraprocessed foods, means that America is experiencing a health epidemic of […]
Review: Lost in translation – lessons from concepts that don’t translate from Arabidopsis The May 2025 issue of The Plant Cell has a focus on Arabidopsis and how this simple model plant has had an outsized impact on our understanding of pretty much everything botanical (and beyond). Alongside several articles highlighting this impact, this review […]
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Arabidopsis genome, a milestone that lives large in those of us who experienced it and eagerly envisioned how this new knowledge would be used. The May 2025 issue of The Plant Cell focuses on how research on this little model plant has translated outwards. […]
We can be assured that every biology student is exposed to plants at least once, when they learn about the genetic laws that Mendel formulated from his studies on peas. His classic work focused on seven traits that exhibited simple dominant-recessive characteristics, such as seed color and shape and flower color. Of these seven traits, […]
I’m sure many of you have experienced frustration when trying to access an intriguing dataset that either doesn’t exist, isn’t open, or is set up in an impossibly unintuitive manner. Part of that problem stems from a lack of training of early-career scientists in how to make their data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). […]
Forum. Plant surveillance: The emerging role of substrate-binding proteins Plants are sessile organisms and, unlike animals, cannot escape adverse environmental conditions. To cope with this limitation, they have evolved a complex surveillance system to detect and respond to fluctuating conditions such as resource scarcity, environmental changes, and pathogen attacks. Membrane-bound receptors play a central role […]