IN BRIEF by Kathleen L. Farquharson [email protected] Polysaccharide-rich cell walls are a distinguishing feature of plants that influence many aspects of growth and development, including cell division. Whereas contractile rings pinch dividing cells into two daughter cells in other eukaryotes, newly built cell walls partition the products of plant cell division. The phragmoplast guides construction […]
IN BRIEF by Nancy Hofmann [email protected] Most bacteria have a peptidoglycan layer between the inner and outer membranes (reviewed in Typas et al., 2012). The cyanobacterial endosymbiont that gave rise to plastids would have contained such a peptidoglycan wall including d-amino acids. Indeed, peptidoglycan can be visualized by electron microscopy in the envelope of cyanelles, […]
Shih et al. review how the many and diverse tools of plant synthetic biology can be applied towards bioenergy crops, focusing on traits related to lignocellulose, oil, and soluble sugars. Tools include those that edit genes, those that alter protein activities, and those that enable gene stacking in crop plants. Examples of successful manipulation of […]
IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart [email protected] When a deer eats the primary shoot of a plant, this can activate a nearby dormant axillary bud, causing it to form a secondary shoot. Genetic and environmental factors also affect shoot architecture, which strongly influences crop productivity. Changes in shoot architecture are mediated by long-distance signals, including phytohormones. […]
IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach [email protected] Movement of macromolecules through the plant phloem provides a mechanism for long-distance signaling that plants use in development, disease resistance, and other adaptive responses (reviewed in Spiegelman et al., 2013). For example, full-length RNAs, such as the Arabidopsis thaliana GIBBERELLIC ACID INSENSITIVE and potato (Solanum tuberosum) BEL5 mRNAs, and […]
IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart [email protected] Investigating how plants grow and develop often requires a bit of creativity. For example, deep within the plant, the vascular cambium, a layer of embryonic, highly cytoplasmic cells, gives rise to xylem and phloem tissue, which must expand throughout the plant’s lifetime. Water and nutrients primarily flow through the […]
Last month I spent a few days at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, where I gave a talk about career building for early career researchers. I’ve shared the slides and here I summarize the take-home messages and links. Chance favors the prepared mind By now you’ve heard that there are […]
Nemhauser and Torii define synthetic biology as “an engineering approach to design, build and analyize dynamic molecular devices and/or pathways from biological components to produce cells and organisms with customized functionality.” In their review, they describe several plant synthetic biology approaches and outcomes, including efforts to identify and remediate toxins, engineer receptors, modify signals and […]
Many plant traits are multigenic, so engineering them requires modulating the expression of several genes simultaneously. Synthetic promoters and transcription factors offer such a possibility. For example, a cis-element can be introduced into the promoter of each gene of interest, and a synthetic transcription factor that activates gene expression via this cis-element and is itself […]