Entries by Tegan Armarego-Marriott

Setting Time for a Hot Date: Paused Embryo Development and Protective Organogenesis Allow Dates to Cope with the Desert Environment

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Adaptive developmental plasticity, in which changing environmental conditions modulate morphogenesis, can help organisms survive harsh conditions. Common examples include the protection of shoot apical meristems by transient arrest and sequestration into bud-like structures in wintering evergreens (e.g. Ruttink et al., 2007), embryonic diapause in mammals, and dormancy of seeds containing fully developed embryos. Date palm […]

Sugar architect: the Brassicaceae pathogen Clubroot manipulates plants on multiple levels to secure sucrose supply

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The soil-borne pathogen Plasmodiophora brassicae can infect most members of the Brassicaceae family. The infections, which can lead to extensive crop losses, typically involve development of galls in the underground tissues of the plant, giving the pathogen its common name, ‘clubroot’. Although not a mandatory part of the pathogen cycle, these galls act as a […]

Stop the Clock: Optimized Carbon Fixation and Circadian Rhythm in a CAM Plant

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The energetically costly tendency of the carbon fixing enzyme RuBisCO to, every now and then, fix oxygen instead of carbon dioxide has led to the evolution of various carbon concentrating mechanisms in plants and algae. One such mechanism, Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), involves primary CO2 fixation in the dark and secondary fixation by RuBisCO in […]