This week’s Plant Science Research Weekly was guest-edited by Batthula Vijaya Lakshmi Vadde. She is currently a postdoc at Adrienne Roeder’s lab, Cornell University studying giant cell patterning in Arabidopsis sepals. Vijaya did her Ph.D. on trichome development in Arabidopsis with Utpal Nath from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Her specific research interests […]
Asymmetric cell divisions (ACDs) are often used by organisms to generate different cell sizes, each adopting a different cell fate. In plants, stomatal development provides an example of an ACD-derived patterning mechanism. Several proteins are known to be implicated in ACDs, like BREAKING OF ASYMMETRY IN THE STOMATAL LINEAGE (BASL) and BREVIS RADIX family (BRXf), […]
The cell cycle requires a series of transitions from G1 to S, S to G2, G2 to M and M to G1 phases. Determining the cell cycle phase is critical for understanding the molecular events specific to a given stage of cell cycle. However, markers for identifying these cell cycle transitions in plants are not […]
Plants produce more root hairs (epidermal projections) in response to low soil phosphate and the detailed mechanism of this developmental response remains elusive. TARGET OF MONOPTEROS 5 (TMO5) and LONESOME HIGHWAY (LHW) are vascular specific bHLH proteins that work as a heterodimer to activate the rate limiting enzyme LONELY GUY4 (LOG4) in cytokinin biosynthesis. Based […]
Many proteins polarize in the cell creating a subcellular niche for various functions. Asymmetric distribution of proteins is a general mechanism for localized growth, directional long-range signaling, cell migration, and asymmetric cell divisions. Well-known examples of polarity proteins include PIN-FORMED1 in auxin transport, and BREAKING OF ASYMMETRY IN THE STOMATAL LINEAGE (BASL), and BREVIS RADIX […]
As sessile organisms, sensing the external conditions is critical for plants to complete their life cycle and temperature is one of the major factors. In Arabidopsis, the evening complex senses the temperature and it consists of EARLY FLOWERING3 (ELF3), a scaffolding protein; ELF4, helical protein; LUX ARRYTHMO (LUX), a DNA binding protein. However, the molecular […]
Arabidopsis seeds consist of various tissue like seed coat, embryo, and endosperm. The endosperm provides the nutrient supplies to the growing embryo and has three domains namely, micropylar (surrounding embryo), chalazal (opposite end of the seed), and peripheral (in between micropylar and chalazal) domain. Even though there is transcriptomic data available for these different domains […]
Flowers bear the reproductive organs and determine the reproductive success of plants by producing fruits and seeds. Flowers usually include four whorls of organs: sepals, petals, stamen and carpel. In this review, Prunet and Duncan discuss various microscopic and tomographic techniques to image flower organs with different levels of resolution and at different depths. They […]
Stomatal development requires cell-to-cell communication and follows one cell spacing, with a minimum of one cell space between two stomata. Key to this communication are the ERECTA and ERECTA LIKE (ERL) Leucine-Rich Repeat domain-Receptor Like kinases (LRR-RLKs) and their ligands, the EPIDERMAL PATTERNING FACTOR (EPF) and EPF-LIKE peptides. Often, a single receptor has different phenotypic outcomes […]