Recent Job Posts: Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology, University of California, Davis CA, USA Professor/Associate Professor/Assistant Professor (Plant Molecular Biology and Crop Improvement), Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China Post Doctoral Research Associate…

Oxygen (O2) is evolved during photosynthetic electron transport when water is split by the oxygen-evolving complex to provide protons and electrons to the chloroplastic electron chain, thereby generating ATP and NADPH—the energy source and reducing power for plant metabolism. The majority of this chemical…

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…

Inorganic phosphate (PPi) is a byproduct of many metabolic reactions, including those involved in sucrose, sugar nucleotide, and cellulose biosynthesis. Although PPi is an important phosphate donor and source of cellular energy, high levels of cytosolic PPi are toxic, disrupting the metabolic reactions…

The story behind m6A (methylation of the N6 position of adenosine), the most common internal mRNA modification in eukaryotes, has long been a source of intrigue. This epitranscriptomic mark is deposited at specific mRNA sequences by m6A writers and removed by m6A erasers. The m6A marks recruit and anchor…

Crosstalk, crosstalk— it’s a word that keeps coming up. Indeed, and perhaps not surprisingly, plant hormone signaling pathways all seem to affect each other to some extent. For example, the MYC2 transcription factor plays roles in abscisic acid (ABA) and jasmonic acid (JA) signaling in the response…

Cell division is essential for growth and reproduction. The cell cycle machinery is well conserved between yeast and animals, but whether this conservation extends to the plant lineage is not clear, having diverged over two billion years ago: ample time and opportunity for divergence in sequence and…

Book Review by Chris Barbey with media by Katie Rogers From Alchemy to IPO describes the beginnings of the biotechnology sector and its progression into the almost modern era, spanning biotech’s inception in the 1970’s through the late 1990’s. While conceptually biotechnology is at least…