Entries by Mary Williams

Plant Biology 2020 workshop: Get Your Message Across: A Guide to Artwork and Illustrations for Better Impact and Clarity

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Attending PB20? Join the ASPB publications team, including editors of The Plant Cell, Plant Direct, and Plant Physiology, for a live discussion about making great figures and illustrations! Wednesday, July 29, 1:30-2:30 EDT. This workshop will cover the production of artwork and illustrations that effectively convey information and complex concepts. The workshop will consist of […]

Review: Plant small heat shock proteins – evolutionary and functional diversity (New Phytol.)

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Heat shock proteins are rapidly induced by heat treatment and were among the first plant genes and proteins characterized in the early days of molecular biology, nearly 40 years ago. Waters and Vierling review the family of small heat shock proteins (sHSPs), which has been especially amplified in plants and even more so in angiosperms. […]

Convergent loss of plant immune receptors and signaling pathways (Plant Cell)

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Nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors (NLRs) are important components of the plant immune system. They are intracellular receptors that act downstream of the cell-surface receptors, and initiate the so-called effector-triggered immunity (ETI). In most plants, the NLR gene family is large and diverse. In exploring this gene family, Baggs et al. found a small number of […]

Highly active rubiscos discovered by systematic interrogation of natural sequence diversity (EMBO J)

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This is a fascinating and very well-written paper that investigates the diversity of rubisco’s kinetic properties. Rubisco’s relationship with its substrate CO2 is complicated by its relationship with O2, and it has often been suggested that for this reason rubisco is locked into a slow rate of catalysis. The plant enzymes are certainly very slow […]

Plant Science Research Weekly: June 26th

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Review: Plant small heat shock proteins – evolutionary and functional diversity Heat shock proteins are rapidly induced by heat treatment and were among the first plant genes and proteins characterized in the early days of molecular biology, nearly 40 years ago. Waters and Vierling review the family of small heat shock proteins (sHSPs), which has […]

Review Single-cell genomics and epigenomics: Technologies and applications in plants ($) (Trends Plant Sci)

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Plants (embryophytes) are by definition multicellular, but we seek to understand them as the sum of the activities of individual cells. Much of this knowledge rests on information obtained through grinding up tissues  made up from several cell types. This review by Luo et al. describes methods for plant single-cell genomics and epigenomics studies. All […]

Plant Science Research Weekly: June 19th

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Review Single-cell genomics and epigenomics: Technologies and applications in plants ($) Plants (embryophytes) are by definition multicellular, but we seek to understand them as the sum of the activities of individual cells. Much of this knowledge rests on information obtained through grinding up tissues  made up from several cell types. This review by Luo et […]

Essays on “What makes a paper *really* pioneering?”

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What makes a paper *really* pioneering? This is the question we posed in a recent webinar. We asked each of our panelists to write a few words on this question, each focusing on a slightly different angle. In the recorded video (below), you can hear the panelists elaborate on these ideas. Here are their written […]