Category: Blog

Banana, the common breakfast component, is also a staple food in some regions of the world. More than 99% of the bananas exported world-wide are the clonally-propagated Cavendish variety, which have very little genetic variation and so are prone to disease outbreaks. Recent years have witnessed the emergence…

A special "thank you" too the many people who have contributed to What We're Reading over the past year! And don't forget you can sign up to receive email alerts - click here then "Notify me of new content". Review: Plant systems biology at the single-cell level The establishment and enormous…

Plants have two major ways of dealing with drought stress. First, when water levels are low, the phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA) induces stomatal closure. Soon after, growth, flowering, and fruit development take a back seat to plant survival. This suppressed growth is mediated by decreased activity…

The C-terminal domain (CTD) of RNA polymerase II (Pol II) extends from the catalytic core and consists of repeats of a seven-amino acid motif. The CTD functions in the regulation of Pol II function and is subject to just about every protein modification you can think of, including methylation, acetylation,…

This past year at ASPB we've been thinking a lot about how we can support early-career researchers no matter their career goals. One of the motivations for developing the Plantae platform has been to provide an online home for plant scientists across the globe and career spectrum, to allow informal communities…

By Romy Schmidt, Daan A Weits, Claudio FJ Feulner, Joost T. van Dongen Plants grow in a dynamic environment and continuously face numerous stress conditions in parallel. This fluctuating environment pushed the evolution of extensive metabolic flexibility (Sweetlove et al., 2010; van Dongen et al.,…

By Thanin Chantarachot and Julia Bailey-Serres The export of an mRNA from the nucleus to the cytoplasm begins an odyssey of dynamic regulation that determines the location, longevity and use of the transcript in the production of polypeptides by ribosomes in plant cells. Recent leveraging of mutants,…