The rhizosphere represents a complex and dynamic environment that poses many challenges for seed germination and seedling establishment. While a number of well-characterized abiotic factors and hormone signaling pathways are known to contribute to the initiation of seed germination, our current understanding of how plant pathogenic bacteria impact germination is poorly resolved. In a recent […]
Plasmodesmata are cell-cell junctions that form cytosolic channels between neighboring plant cells. These junctions mediate the exchange of information between cells during various stress and developmental programs by actively regulating the aperture of the channel entrance or ‘pore’. In a new study published in eLIFE, Diao et al. discovered that the Arabidopsis actin nucleation factor […]
Plant lipid transfer proteins (LTPs) display a strikingly clear capacity to bind lipidic molecules yet their mechanistic role in plant developmental or stress physiology is not yet clear. In a recent study published in Molecular Plant Pathology, Fahlberg et al. (2018) investigated the role of glycophosphatidylinositiol-(GPI)-anchored LTPs in resistance to non-adapted powdery mildew pathogens in […]
Plants engage in intimate interactions with symbiotic microbes for the mutually beneficial exchange of nutrients. In a keystone study published in PLoS Biology, Van Deyze et al. (2018) describe the presence of nitrogen-fixing microbiota contained within an extensively carbohydrate rich mucilage found on the aerial roots of a Mexican landrace of maize (Sierra Mixe). Such […]
The transition from aquatic to terrestrial environments exposed the earliest land plants to higher doses of damaging ultraviolet (UV-B) radiation. To cope with this stress, land plants evolved complex signalling mechanisms and an inventory of protective ‘sunscreen-like’ flavonoids. To explore whether this paradigm is conserved in extant early divergent land plants, Clayton et al. (2018) […]
As sessile organisms, plants must constantly sense and respond to a dynamic range of stimuli in their environment, which includes both the duration of light (photoperiod) and the presence of microbial invaders. In a recent article published in Plant Physiology, Cagnola et al. (2018) investigate how plant defense responses are affected in Arabidopsis exposed to […]
Complex developmental programs regulate tissue and organ formation throughout the green plant lineage, from early diverging non-vascular lineages (bryophytes) to vascular flowering (angiosperm) plants. In the model liverwort Marchantia polymorpha, epidermal patterning gives rise to surface structures such as air pore complexes and gemma cups that house asexually-derived clonal liverwort propagules (gemmae), yet the underlying […]
Land plants evolved from freshwater charophytic algae over ~450 million years ago and have since diverged into the plethora of embryophyte genera that we see today. Genomics efforts have classically focused on key angiosperm species representing experimental model systems and/or agriculturally important crops, yet an increasing amount of attention is now being given to earlier […]
The pathogenic oomycete Phytophthora capsici secretes RXLR effector proteins into plant cells to subvert host cell machinery and facilitate disease. Several RXLR effector proteins have been characterized to date, however, Phytophthora species encode a vast array of effector molecules that likely target different cellular compartments during infection. In a recent article in Molecular Plant, Fan […]