Root research got a boost from Arabidopsis grown on Petri plants, but what do you do if you study something bigger, or want to see how roots grow in soil? Zheng et al. developed a new set of tools they call CREAMD-COFE [Core Root Excavation using Compressed-air (to extract the roots from soil), and Core […]
Review: Design and engineering of advanced plant optogenetics systems Optogenetics uses light-sensitive proteins to trigger specific outputs in the cell in response to particular wavelengths of light. Many optogenetic systems use chimeric proteins that contain different sensor and effector domains; with this, it is possible to use light to modulate DNA-binding activity, gene expression, or […]
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In a new Perspective by Wurtzel et al., the authors lay out SynBio’s tremendous potential to transform agriculture. Consider how we might leverage the “vast design space that plants have not occupied.” As an example, plants employ two pathways to fix carbon, and prokaryotes another six, but scientists have identified another 28 potential pathways (so […]
Although the first signaling peptide identified in plants, systemin, is involved in stress responses, developmentally important peptide signals have largely occupied the limelight. This Tansley Review by Chen et al. summarizes recent insights into peptides with a role in stress responses: wounding, pathogen infection, nutrient imbalance, drought and high salinity. Many were first identified computationally, […]
Drawing on more than 15 years of improvements, Nakano et al. have released public websites and resources for data access, display, and analysis of plant small RNAs, from Arabidopsis to wheat and with many crops and model species represented. The tools can analyze, integrate and display the abundance of small RNAs, RNA-Seq and ChIP-Seq data, […]
The Zygnematophyceae are the green algae that are most closely related to land plants. Some species in this clade are considered subaerial, meaning that they can live under air (as opposed to under water). The green films you see on tree trunks and walls are often Zygnematophycaea. Several new insights into the terrestrialization of land […]
The origins of ABA signaling have long been puzzling. Green algae make ABA but don’t respond to it, and ABA receptors have appeared to be missing from their genomes. Reccently, Sun et al. identified a gene encoding an ortholog of PYL family of ABA receptor proteins in the transcriptome of an alga from the Zygnematophyceae […]
The Ug99 strain of wheat stem rust pathogen Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici (Pgt) emerged in Uganda in 1999 and presents a significant threat to global wheat production. Genetic analysis indicates it is distinct from other Pgt races. Li et al. set out to understand its origins. Puccinia graminis are dikaryotic fungi meaning they carry […]