Entries by Scott Hayes

Cryptochromes Go Toe to Toe with TOEs Too

Scott Hayes Affiliation: Laboratory of Plant Physiology, Wageningen University, Wageningen 6708 PB, The Netherlands ORCiD: 0000-0001-8943-6238 scott.hayes@wur.nl To breed or not to breed, that is the question. The switch from vegetative to reproductive growth is one of the most important steps in a plant’s life cycle. Flower too early or too late and there is […]

Location, location, location: phototropin 2 action at the chloroplast membrane

As someone with a background in plant molecular genetics, I confess to occasionally forgetting about location. Reverse genetics is a powerful tool for picking apart gene networks, but in which organ do these genes act? Which tissue of that organ? Which cells of that tissue and which compartment of those cells? These are important questions […]

PIF4 plays a conserved role in Solanum lycopersicum

Scott Hayes, S.hayes@cnb.csic.es The adoption of Arabidopsis thaliana as a model plant in the early 1980s led to a revolution in plant molecular genetics. Its diminutive size, rapid generation time and small genome made Arabidopsis a fantastic tool, allowing us to build a complex picture of the genetic architecture underlying plant development (Koornneef and Meinke, 2010). […]

BRacing for water stress: Brassinosteroid signalling promotes drought survival in wheat

Brassinosteroids (BRs) have come a long way since their first identification in 1979 as pollen-derived, growth-promoting hormones. Multiple studies have demonstrated roles for BRs in the control of cell elongation, pollen fertility, root architecture, seed germination, stomatal patterning, vascular development, seed germination and flowering (Yang et al., 2011). In recent years, additional roles for BRs […]

Improving on the Humble Spud

The humble spud. Simple, unassuming, yet vital in supporting a large proportion of the world’s population. Historically speaking, much of the research performed on potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) has gone into enhancing their disease resistance, justifiably so given the severe famines brought about through potato blight in the mid-1800s and early 1900s. More recently, however, researchers […]