By Laura Klasek The beginning of 2020 brought resolutions, refreshed to-do lists, and, somewhere in the rush of things drifting over your desk, the opening of Plant Biology 2020 abstract submission and registration. Some of you already know you will be in Washington, D.C. this July because you haven’t missed a Plant Biology conference since […]
Whenever we talk about global trends there are of course local variations. Here, Piao et al. discuss recent trends of global greening, which is occurring at arctic as well as temperate and tropical regions. Overall, this greening is attributed to increasing atmospheric CO2, which promotes plant growth, but artic greening is also a consequence of […]
Iron (Fe) is an important micronutrient needed by plants for survival. Plants have evolved a range of morphological, physiological and molecular responses to Fe availability, including the transcriptional regulation of over one thousand genes in response to Fe deficiency (-Fe) in Arabidopsis. However, the cis-regulatory elements (CREs) and their combinations that regulate the adaptive response […]
Yellow rust is a fungal disease of wheat. Three mutants with enhanced resistance were identified in wild emmer wheat from different locations were previously mapped to the same region of chromosome 1B. Given that each locus showed a different degree of resistance, it was presumed that they were non-allelic. Klymiuk et al. have now shown […]
FLS2 is a well-characterized cell-surface receptor that recognizes a short epitope found on most bacterial flagellin proteins. The plant pathogen Agrobacterium tumefaciens, causative agent of crown gall disease, deviates strongly at this epitope region, and so is generally not recognized by FLS2 receptors, facilitating its pathogenicity. Fürst et al. set out to try to identify […]
Review: Characteristics, drivers and feedbacks of global greening Whenever we talk about global trends there are of course local variations. Here, Piao et al. discuss recent trends of global greening, which is occurring at arctic as well as temperate and tropical regions. Overall, this greening is attributed to increasing atmospheric CO2, which promotes plant growth, […]
With the rise of high-impact commercially published journals in recent years, journals published by learned societies face greater competition than ever before. While many society journals are among the highest-impact titles in their fields, making them top choices among scholars, for societies it is becoming increasingly important to communicate the unique value of their titles […]
We have only recently begun to appreciate the phenomenon of cross-species or cross-kingdom small RNA transfer, and its applications. Using examples from plants and animals, Cai et al. summarize how some pathogens have evolved the capacity to introduce small RNAs into their host to suppress host defense responses, for example by hijacking host small RNA […]
Orphan genes are those that are found in only a single species. In trying to understand the origin of orphan genes, O’Conner and Li have found that many of these orphan genes are likely to have originated as mitochondrial genes, as many are nuclear genes whose encoded proteins are targeted to the mitochondria through encoded […]