This comprehensive review by Mogollón et al. would be a great starting point to help students think about the pressing challenge of feeding growing numbers of people in the face of climate change. The article begins with the impact of food production on the environment; the release of greenhouse gasses, land use changes, soil erosion, […]
Plants rely on microbes to aid their uptake of nutrients. Most plants from an intimate association with mycorrhizal fungi, in which both partners benefit through the exchange of nutrients and photosynthate. In the most common form, arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, the fungus forms branched structures within the plant cell, providing a specialized surface area for this […]
The totipotency of plant tissues makes them very amenable to propagation through somatic tissues. Tissue culture propagation is used to regenerate gene edited plants from single cells and to cultivate plants that are difficult to propagate sexually. In a recent paper, Davis et al. investigated the genomic impact of tissue culture, using propagated walnut lines. […]
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 […]