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iGRAD-Plant, the International Graduate School for Plant Science

Last week I was a guest of the PhD students of the iGRAD-Plant program, based at Heinrich Heine University (HHU), Düsseldorf (Germany). The program is an international joint PhD program with the nearby Research Center Jülich and the Genetics Program of Michigan State University. The program is funded…

Counting Carbs: Tracking Fluctuations in Starch-Derived Metabolite Levels Uncovers Their Crucial Roles in Osmotic Stress Tolerance

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IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart jlockhart@aspb.org At first glance, starch is just an inert, calorie-laden material produced by plants to store excess carbohydrates derived from photosynthesis. Starch accumulates in leaf mesophyll cells during the day and is metabolized at night. The precise circadian…

Ticket to Ride: tRNA-Related Sequences and Systemic Movement of mRNAs

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IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach jmach@aspb.org Movement of macromolecules through the plant phloem provides a mechanism for long-distance signaling that plants use in development, disease resistance, and other adaptive responses (reviewed in Spiegelman et al., 2013). For example, full-length RNAs, such…