The other day I was talking to a friend about the need to demystify plants, so that teachers feel as confident in their teaching of plant biology as they do about animal biology. I wonder if sometimes we teach plants too much in isolation, so it’s not always clear how plants relate to other organisms […]
IN BRIEF by Nancy R. Hofmann nhofmann@aspb.org Plant cell walls consist of cellulose microfibrils embedded in a matrix of polymers including hemicelluloses. As one of the main hemicelluloses in the cell walls of dicots, xyloglucan is an important target of study to understand plant cell walls in general and for polymer applications in biotechnology. Xyloglucan […]
IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach jmach@aspb.org Plants can dispose of organs such as leaves and recycle the nutrients in these organs into new leaves, seeds, or storage organs. However, when separated from its photosystem proteins, chlorophyll can be phototoxic, absorbing light and producing high-energy electrons. The complex chlorophyll degradation pathway solves this problem by breaking […]
IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart jlockhart@aspb.org Heat and drought stress greatly restrict crop productivity, but most of what we know about a plant’s response to these stresses comes from controlled laboratory studies. This factor, along with the complex nature of these responses, has hampered efforts to breed and engineer crops with improved stress tolerance. Plants […]
Recently, we’ve been profiling first authors of Plant Cell papers that are selected for In Brief summaries. Here are the first-author profiles from the September issue of The Plant Cell. Inmaculada Couso, featured first author of Synergism between inositol polyphosphates and TOR kinase signaling in nutrient sensing, growth control and lipid metabolism in Chlamydomonas Current […]
Recently, we’ve been profiling first authors of Plant Cell papers that are selected for In Brief summaries. Here are the first-author profiles from the August issue of The Plant Cell. Aman Y. Husbands and Vasudha Aggarwal, featured first authors of In Planta Single-Molecule Pull-down (SiMPull) Reveals Tetrameric Stoichiometry of HD-ZIPIII:LITTLE ZIPPER Complexes. Aman Y. Husbands […]
IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart jlockhart@aspb.org At first glance, starch is just an inert, calorie-laden material produced by plants to store excess carbohydrates derived from photosynthesis. Starch accumulates in leaf mesophyll cells during the day and is metabolized at night. The precise circadian control of this process ensures optimal energy utilization. Starch also accumulates in […]
IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach jmach@aspb.org Assessing protein-protein interactions remains a fundamental challenge for plant biologists. Current methods such as coimmunoprecipitation (co-IP), yeast two-hybrid, bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC), and others can produce artifacts and also yield only a bulk “ensemble” readout that is difficult to quantify, much less examine statistically. For example, the fluorescent protein […]
Carotenoids are nutritionally important phytonutrients. Comas et al. describe a strategy to enhance the production of cartotenoids in the seed endosperm. They start with quantitative metabolomics and gene expression data which they feed into mathematical models to determine which gene(s) need to be engineered. Some of the genes they identify have been identified and verified […]