COVID-19 has derailed everyone’s lives and plans; 2020 is truly an “annus horribilis.” Yet clearly this pandemic has hit some harder than others. Note for example the greatly disproportionate mortality in Black and Indigenous populations, which surely contributed to the outpouring of outrage following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others. For many, […]
Review. Roles of plant retinoblastoma protein: cell cycle and beyond The cell cycle is at the heart of processes such as cell division, fate acquisition and cell cycle exit towards differentiation. Decades of cell cycle research in animals and yeast have outlined the main components that control the cycle’s transitions, such as cyclins, cyclin-dependent kinases, […]
Plantae Presents – Alejandra I. Huerta and Paola Reyes-Caldas Recorded Tuesday Sep 8, 2020 9:00 PM EDT (6:00 PM PDT) Alejandra I. Huerta: In pursuit of durable disease resistance in rice: Exploiting effectors, allelic variation and MAGIC Alejandra I. Huerta is an Assistant Professor of Phytobacteriology in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at […]
Many plants take advantage of microbial symbionts to boost their nutrient uptake, with classic examples provided by mycorrhizal fungi and the legume/Rhizobia partnership. Similar symbiotic partners are found in other domains of life, including the coral/dinoflagellate symbiosis, and the symbiosis between many insects or other animals and their gut microbiota. Chomicki et al. address all […]
Review. Imaging flowers: a guide to current microscopy and tomography techniques to study flower development Flowers bear the reproductive organs and determine the reproductive success of plants by producing fruits and seeds. Flowers usually include four whorls of organs: sepals, petals, stamen and carpel. In this review, Prunet and Duncan discuss various microscopic and tomographic […]
Implicit Bias and Conscious Inclusion A joint workshop of ASPB’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Women in Plant Biology Committees When: Friday, September 11, 2020 at 9 AM PDT (UTC-7) | 11 AM CDT (UTC-5) | 12 PM EDT (UTC-4) NOTE: This webinar is 2 hours long. To register, please complete this form. Registration is […]
There are many well-known advantages to hybrid seeds. However, one obstacle is the tendency of some plants to self-pollinate. The development of genetically male-sterile lines greatly facilitates hybrid seed production, as the maternal male-sterile plant cannot self-fertilize and depends on donor pollen to set seed. Of course, this raises the question of how these lines […]
Review: Extending Plant Defense Theory to Seeds ($) Plants have developed multiple mechanisms to deal with the natural enemies they encounter through their life. In consequence, the Plant Defense Theory has arisen to assess how plants allocate resources to this purpose. However, much of the efforts in this matter has revolved around the defense that […]
Loss-of-function mutants have been invaluable tools in the geneticist’s toolbox for more than a century. More recently, libraries have been developed of knockout insertion mutants at known sites. Here, a new Mu-transposon insertion sequence-indexed maize resource is described. This new collection, BonnMu (developed in Bonn, Germany) complements the North American UniformMu and the Asian ChinaMu […]