Benzyl alcohol is a volatile compound and the scent molecule of several seed plants. It also can be converted to benzyl benzoate, which is one of the routes to salicylic acid (SA) production in plants. The flowers of Petunia hybrida are wonderful factories of benzyl alcohol, prompting Lee et al. to use it as a […]
A lichen is a unique composite organism formed through close interactions between a filamentous fungus (mycobiont) and its photosynthetic partners [algae and/ or cyanobacteria, referred together as photobiont(s)]. In an effort to better understand these mutualistic interactions, Joisten-Rosenthal et al. created a high-quality super-pangenome from long-read genome assemblies of 41 isolates representing 11 species of […]
You ask a plant science specific question to a general-purpose large language model (LLM) and it puts out vague answers. Sometimes you wonder if the answer is valid or if the LLM is pulling you into a hallucination trap! Does this sound familiar? To tackle this problem, PlantScience.ai, a virtual scientist for plant sciences, has […]
Biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) are groups of genes physically located in close proximity in a genomic region and can be thought of as a close-knit genomic orchestra. While these BGCs were thought to be rare in plants, unlike bacteria, Peng et al. takes the story a step ahead with the discovery of a BGC in […]