Review. Beyond elite crops: Designing resilient agriculture from wild plant diversity When looking at the foods that fill our supermarkets, it can be hard to imagine we are relying on just a handful of domesticated plant species. Thousands of wild plants, each with its own unique strengths, remain overlooked and underused. For years, plant breeders […]
When I’ve had a stressful week I feel like I’ve aged 10 years. Luckily I bounce back after a bit of rest. By contrast, a new paper by Swift et al. shows that, in plants at least, stress accelerates aging at the transcriptional level. First, they did single-cell transcriptional profiling of leaves of different ages […]
Review: Plants calcium signaling is both conserved and plant-specific Although calcium ions are universal second messengers, plants employ both conserved and unique strategies to decode Ca²⁺ signals. In a new review in Cell, Sheng Luan reviews the molecular tools used to study calcium signaling in plants and the mechanisms that govern this process. Like other […]
Mangroves are salt-adapted trees that provide critical habitats for many organisms and stabilize shorelines. They also have several strategies for dealing with the hostile coastal environment that is high in salt and, for the submerged root system, low in oxygen. Pneumatophores are upward-growing components of the root system that have been shown to take up […]
Rhizobial symbiosis requires communication and recognition between the plant host and the nitrogen-fixing bacteria. When successful, plant root hairs reorganize their membranes and form specialized infection threads through which the rhizobia enter the root and initiate nodules. In new work, Qiao et al. examined how this root hair reprogramming takes place, focusing on the reorganization […]
Review: Rare variants in crops genomes and how to spot them Despite the usefulness of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for linking DNA variation to agronomic traits, GWAS are focused on detecting common alleles and often fail to detect less-common, rare variants. Rare variants may account for a significant portion of the heritability behind complex traits […]
The awesome power of metagenomics is providing fascinating insights into the origins of life. Tracing backwards from today’s life forms we can identify features that were likely present in the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), as well as the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA), which arose after the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis. This exciting paper […]
Genetic studies in Arabidopsis have identified a lot of the participants in signal transduction pathways, but often its less clear precisely where they function. As an example, although it is well known that H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) production by RBOHs in the apoplast triggers many downstream cellular events, exactly where the signal is effective and how […]
Clearly, the mechanical properties of plant cell walls have important implications for growth and development, but they are not necessarily easy to measure, especially in intact, living tissues. Here, Alonso-Baez et al. used Brillouin microscopy and molecular rotors to characterize cell wall properties in Arabidopsis seedling roots. Brillouin microscopy determines wall stiffness and viscosity (which […]