Phalaenopsis orchids produce beautiful, long-lived flowers and are widely popular houseplants. In 1996, a new variety was identified with intensely dark, nearly black pigmentation. Hsu et al. have identified the molecular basis for this phenotype; a Gypsy-like retrotransposon inserted in the promoter of a gene encoding a MYB transcription factor. Insertion of HORT1 (Harlequin Orchid […]
Default activation and nuclear translocation of the plant cellular energy sensor SnRK1 ($) When I’m using my laptop without it being plugged in, at some point it enters battery saving mode as it senses that the battery charge is getting low. Organisms also sense their low energy reserves and activate alternate metabolic processes to ensure […]
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. We have conducted a set of video interviews with leaders in the […]
Data visualization: optimizing data exploration and illustrative storytelling Recorded May 21, 2019 About This Webinar The field of plant biology is undergoing a revolution due to the enormous amount of data that is being produced, either by high-throughput sequencing or non-destructive plant phenotyping platforms. Visualizing big-data is not an easy task but it helps […]
By Benjamin Schwessinger Here we present the extended support material for our ‘Reproducibility for Everyone’ workshop at ASPB #PlantBio18. All material is available under a CC BY 4.0 license. Please feel free to remix, copy, distribute, use, improve, and snowball The extended handout is available as pdf, word, and google doc. The extended presentation is […]
“The 1980s were an exciting and revolutionary time for biology, and plant molecular biology in particular,” begins an editorial by Bob Goldberg, Brian Larkins, and Ralph Quatrano, the three Founding Editors of The Plant Cell. They describe why the American Society of Plant Physiologists (ASPP; later, ASPB) felt that the time was right for a […]
Wheat is of course a hugely important food for humans, and has been selectively bred across the globe for millennia. Modern bread wheats are hexaploid and contain three distinct subgenomes (AABBDD). As with other crops, there is a need to understand wheat’s ancestry and explore the greater genetic diversity of its extended family as sources […]
Like other seed crops, wheat yields depend in part on the efficiency with which nutrients stored in leaves are mobilized into the developing seeds. This depends on the several processes from macromolecule breakdown to transport, as well as the timing of leaf senescence. Borrill et al. used RNA analysis and gene regulatory network (GRN) modeling […]
Yams (Dioscorea spp.) were domesticated independently in three continents. African yam (Dioscorea rotundata) is the second most produced crop in Africa, after cassava but ahead of maize, rice and sorghum. Scarcelli et al. use a genomic approach to learn more about its domestication, by sequencing many varieties of the domesticated species as well as its […]