Special Issue of Current Biology on plant evolution Current Biology has an excellent special issue on plant evolution full of fascinating articles. As an example, a Primer by Zhuo Feng looks at how plants were catastrophically impacted by the end-Permian mass extinction event approximately 250 million years ago. The fossil record from the Cathaysian Flora, […]
Our food crops are threatened by ever-increasing environmental challenges as a consequence of climate change. It’s critical that we develop strategies to monitor and mitigate these stresses, but it’s also a huge undertaking. A new focus issue in Physiologia Plantarum provides a set of articles that span diverse methods and tools to assess crop stress […]
There are numerous ways that AI can support research productivity through its ability to evaluate large datasets. Plant Communications has assembled a collection of articles that describe some of these new tools and approaches. As an example, Jang et al. describe the use of digital twins as tools to evaluate plant-microbe interactions. They describe how […]
Compared to their aquatic relatives, early land plants faced many challenges, such as a lack of buoyancy, harmful UV light, the challenge of nutrient uptake, and the need to avoid desiccation. In a fascinating review (part of the Plant Physiology focus collection on early land plant evolution), Domozych describes the structure and function of the […]
In this interesting Letter to the Editor, Drew and Nagel explore the concept of how identities are established, and draw a comparison between the scientific identity of a person and the cellular identity of a developing guard cell. The article starts by briefly describing the cell autonomous and non-cell autonomous cues that control the differentiation […]
Special issue on methods to assess crop stress resilience Our food crops are threatened by ever-increasing environmental challenges as a consequence of climate change. It’s critical that we develop strategies to monitor and mitigate these stresses, but it’s also a huge undertaking. A new focus issue in Physiologia Plantarum provides a set of articles that […]
We are living at a time where insights into plant diversity, function, and evolution are being revealed at an unprecedented rate, thanks largely to the ability to readily sequence and assemble genomes. A new Perspective by Want, along with a large, international group of co-authors, sets out an exciting and ambitious proposal the fill in […]
This is a very interesting Perspective article by Barry et al. that should be of interest to anyone who has benefitted from Indigenous Knowledges or who teaches about scientific writing. The authors, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars in Australia, explore how Indigenous Knowledges should be cited. While they stress the importance of formally […]
Review: Revisiting endophyte-mediated plant protection across diverse host systems Endophytic bacteria and fungi, the invisible allies within plant tissues, are emerging as powerful contributors to sustainable agriculture. They can enhance plant defense through multiple mechanisms, including antibiosis, niche competition, and the induction of systemic resistance, thereby reducing reliance on chemical pesticides. Noor and colleagues highlight […]