The rapidly changing climate will have profound effects on Earth’s ecosystems, but as yet it is difficult to determine exactly what these effects will be. Exposito-Alonso et al. have set up a large experiment to try to identify how a population’s genetic diversity will enable it to survive a future climate, by growing more than […]
Review: Metabolite control of translation by conserved peptide uORFs: The ribosome as a metabolite multi-sensor Not all mRNAs are translated equally. Between 25–50% of eukaryotic mRNAs have an upstream open reading frame (uORF) that affects translation of the main ORF (mORF). Usually the presence of an uORF inhibits translation, but under some conditions the ribosome […]
Synthetic biology is a set of tools, a way of thinking, the integration of engineering principles into biological sciences, and potentially the biggest opportunity for advances in plant sciences since PCR. Yet many struggle to define it, and fewer still grasp its full potential. What is synthetic biology all about? To answer this question, we have […]
EIN2 is a key regulator of the ethylene response and a protein with a complex function and regulation. Zander et al. have uncovered an interesting and complex mechanism by which its expression is regulated. Many genes are regulated through histone modifications, with the histone variant H2A.Z and the histone mark H3K27me3 both repressors of transcription. […]
Plant peptide patterning is popping up everywhere! Now Kawamoto et al. show that a pair of peptides, interacting with receptor proteins, coordinates the placement of ovules in Arabidopsis. They started with a natural variation analysis, which highlighted that several varieties with mutations in the ERECTA gene (which encodes a LRR-receptor kinase) have high-ovule densities, which […]
We have a tendency to think of genes carrying mutations as having a negative impact on fitness, which raises the question of why they might persist in a population. Taylor et al. tested whether large-effect mutations that affect flowering time might not be detrimental in all conditions, by comparing their effects in natural populations of […]
Plant scientists know that when the air at the leaf surface is dry, the plant will tend to close its stomata, but we tend to think of this as a relatively localized effect. Yuan et al. have explored the global trends in vapor pressure deficit (VPD; difference between saturated and real water content of the […]
A modular cloning toolkit for genome editing in plants Genome editing with the CRISPR/Cas system is now widely used in functional studies across biological sciences including plant biology. Typically, this system involves a DNA nuclease and a guide RNA that directs the nuclease to a specific location in the genome. Golden Gate (GG) is a […]
Membranes have long been considered somewhat inert materials in a cell’s organization, but it is becoming clear that lipid composition and distribution contributes actively to cell shape and dynamics. Pan et al. examined the contribution of lipids to the shape of epidermal pavement cells in Arabidopsis leaves. They found that the indentations of the pavement […]