When a plant species is introduced to a new region, it brings with it “hitchhikers” – other associated organisms. Sometimes, these hitchhikers negatively impact the environment into which they are introduced, for example by facilitating the host’s invasiveness, or through direct detrimental effects (such as pathogenicity) on native plants. Factors that determine whether a hitchhiker […]
Orphan legumes, which include cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), Bambara groundnut (V. subterranea), grass pea (Lathyrus sativus) and marama bean (Tylosema esculentum), are important food sources for many farmers, but have largely been ignored by breeders and industry. Cullis and Kunert argue that some of these species can provide traits such as drought tolerance to benefit major […]
Coffee is a hugely popular beverage and contributes immeasurably to human productivity, but demand has risen by 50% in the past 20 years while coffee production is vulnerable to disease and climate change. Mehrabi and Lashermes observe that the popular arabica coffee comes from the plant Coffea arabica, which arose in Ethiopia from a hybridization […]
Casadevall and Fang set out several proposals for research training to help ensure scientific “rigor”, which they define as promoting confidence in the truth or accuracy of the findings. The authors propose and elaborate on five foundations for scientific rigor: Redundancy in experimental design, recognition of error, intellectual honesty, sound statistical analysis, and avoidance of […]
Robust models of stomatal conductance are greatly needed to predict plant-atmosphere interactions in a changing climate, and to integrate new knowledge in physiology and ecological theory. Recent years have brought major advances in the experimental and theoretical understanding underpinning both process-based and optimality-based approaches to modeling stomatal function. I review these advances, highlight areas in […]
Due to plant cells’ shared walls and immobility, cell division, differentiation and expansion must be tightly regulated across space and time. The six members of the PLETHORA (PLT) transcription factor family distribute in gradients through the root tip and are largely responsible for its developmental patterning. Santuari et al. studied the gene set transcriptionally regulated […]
Auxins are a class of phytohormones that regulate many aspects of plant development. Morales-Tapia and Cruz-Ramírez review the current status of the available auxin-driven computational models and discuss plausible integration of these into a single model for plant development. Computational modeling of auxin through a single, unified model would enable predictions of plant behavior under […]
It has been argued that rising atmospheric CO2 levels might benefit plants by providing them more substrate for photosynthetic carbon-fixation. However, numerous studies have indicated that other factors interfere with a so-called CO2-fertilization benefit. Girardin et al. explore recent tree growth by analysing 873 tree-ring chronologies obtains from Canada’s National Forest Inventory. Although they observed […]
Heat stress is one of the main abiotic stresses plants encounter. Jiang et al. used combined transcriptomic and proteomic data to explore the responses of grape leaves to elevated temperatures (35, 40, 45°C). Using high-throughput sequencing and the iTRAQ (isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantitation) method, they found that non-random posttranscriptional events, particularly alternative […]