Review. After the deluge: Plant revival post-flooding Crop losses due to flooding are occuring with increasing frequency. Whilst time submerged can be lethal, the post-submergence period is also potentially lethal. In this new review, Yeung et al. provide an overview of factors that contribute to plant survival after flooding. Being submerged leads to hypoxia (oxygen […]
I really enjoyed this review article, which very successfully introduces the reader to the why and how of how to apply network science to plant science. Bassel never veers off into abstraction or “math-speak”, but instead roots his explanations in familiar biological or ordinary terms. As an example, he describes a structural network as a […]
Plant synthetic biology is heating up, as ideas and methods initially developed for single-celled organisms are moving into the more interesting and complicated space of multicellular organisms; this leads to greater potentials as well as greater challenges. Why plants? One important reason is that they are photosynthetic, so don’t require the same level of energy […]
Switches and circuits are key parts of a synthetic biologist’s toolbox. Andres et al. provide historical background and core ideas as well as current understanding of these devices. Switches are defined as components that detect an input signal and transform it into an output signal. Inputs can be chemicals (e.g., tetracycline or dexamethasone) or, light, […]
Half of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Frances Arnold “for the directed evolution of enzymes”. Essentially, this involves modifying an enzyme and screening its properties repeatedly to develop an enzyme with novel attributes. Engqvist and Rabe review this powerful method and its application to plant biology. First, they describe methods for […]
Nobori and Tsuda review how the plant immune system is able to function in heterogeneous environments through its properties of resilience, tunability and balance. They define a resilient system as one where “output remains stable even when part of the system is disabled.” Abiotic factors such as high temperatures and pathogen effectors can disable parts […]
The 2017 Chemistry Nobel Prize went to the developers of cryo-electron microscopy, and this method is transforming plant science as well as other life sciences. In a pair of back-to-back papers, Wang et al. used cryo-EM to examine how ZAR1, a CC-NLR protein [Coiled-coil (CC) nucleotide-binding (NB), leucine-rich repeat (LRR)], interacts with its partners and […]
Bacterial flagellin is a well-known microbial pattern that triggers plant immune responses. Flagellin is a glycosylated protein polymer. The immunogenic domain is buried within the protein structure as well as beneath a glycan layer. Buscaill et al. set out to identify how this immunogenic elicitor is exposed and and to what extent this mechanism is […]
Review. Multicellular systems biology: Applying network science to plant organ patterning and function I really enjoyed this review article, which very successfully introduces the reader to the why and how of how to apply network science to plant science. Bassel never veers off into abstraction or “math-speak”, but instead roots his explanations in familiar biological […]