Focus Issue on Cellular Dynamics (January 2018) Editors: Dan Szymanski, Diane Bassham, Teun Munnik, and Wataru Sakamoto Submission Deadline: June 5, 2017 To be published in January 2018, this focus issue will provide a series of invited Update Reviews on hot topics in plant cell biology, with broad coverage of the major plant organelles and […]
Abstract Meiosis is a specialized cell division, essential in most reproducing organisms to halve the number of chromosomes, thereby enabling the restoration of ploidy levels during fertilization. A key step of meiosis is homologous recombination, which promotes homologous pairing and generates crossovers (COs) to connect homologous chromosomes until their separation at anaphase I. These CO […]
Drought tolerance is a complex trait, and Avramova et al. show that there is more than one way to be drought tolerant. Specifically, they investigate the role of antioxidants in supporting leaf growth in several varieties of drought tolerant maize. As compared to the tolerant lines, drought sensitive varieties accumulate more reactive oxygen species, including […]
Rubisco (Ribulose-1,5-biphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase) is the key enzyme in photosynthetic carbon fixation. In C3 plants, the enzyme is usually found in mesophyll cells and guard cells, but it also can be found in photosynthetic glandular trichomes such as those found in tobacco. Laterre et al. used comparative proteomics to identify proteins specifically expressed in glandular trichomes. […]
Flowering at the right time of year is crucial for plant reproductive success, so in many plants the transition to reproductive growth is sensitive to daylength. In recent years, the daylength-responsive signal that moves from leaves to the shoot apical meristem, florigen (encoded by FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) in Arabidopsis), has been identified, but questions […]
When a pathogen is perceived, plants have the ability to induce stomatal closure to prohibit the pathogens from passing into the inner tissues; this response is known as stomatal immunity. Two new papers in The Plant Cell investigate mechanisms by which pathogen perception is transduced into stomatal closure. Su et al. 10.1105/tpc.16.00577 show that MPK3 […]
To safeguard human health and the environment, the French government has called for a nation-wide reduction in the use of pesticides (herbicides, fungicides and insecticides). Towards this end, they have been collecting pesticide usage and yield data from French farmers. Lechenet et al. explored these data to identify potential impacts of decreasing pesticide use. Their […]
Review: The increasing impact of activity-based protein profiling in plant science Activity-based protein profiling is a proteomics approach that involves covalently labeling reporter tags to subsets of proteins based on their active sites. Morimoto and van der Hoorn define different types of probes and the types of proteins that they bind to. Activity profiling can […]
The SPINDLY (SPY) gene was identified through a genetic screen; spy mutants are abnormally tall and thin, suggesting that they are overly sensitive to gibberellins. Later, the SPY gene was shown to act downstream of GIBBEERLLIN INSENSITIVE (GAI), which is a DELLA-domain containing protein. SPY was previously identified as showing homology to O-GlcNac transferases, but […]