Category: Blog

Plant Blindness negatively affects plant conservation, despite plants being a majority on the endangered species list. Balding and Williams review the research on plant blindness and argue that it isn’t inevitable. There are cultures in the world more keenly aware of plants than most in western societies…

High throughput phenotyping (HTP) is a frontier in plant biology. Shakoor et al. review the state of HTP and various levels of implementation, current limitations, and the new horizons for the field. Envirotyping – getting all the information possible from an individual plant in a field to fully understand…

With data generation, high false positive rates, and inability to reproduce findings all on the rise in science, Benjamin et al. propose lowering the standard threshold of the p-value to 0.005. The p < 0.05 standard would be termed “suggestive” under this scheme. Some of the caveats are that this…

The International Botanical Congress was held in Shenzhen, China (#IBC2017) last week. The AoB Blog published several blog posts and tweet collections from the conference. The Congress also voted on The Shenzhen Declaration on Plant Science designed to unite plant scientists around several priorities…

Hu et al. found a sterile rice mutant defective in meiosis. They mapped it to MEICA1, a widely conserved but uncharacterized protein required to ensure crossovers occur between allelic regions of chromosomes. It also inhibits allelic homologous recombination. This adds to a suite of proteins eukaryotic…

With both biotic and abiotic stresses predicted to worsen due to climate change, the ideal crop of the future must have traits to handle both. Common abiotic stresses like drought, cold, and salinity cause osmotic stress by disrupting cell turgor. Exposure to a mild salt treatment leads some plants to…

Light and temperature are two major factors affecting plants’ growth. Jiang et al. discovered a circuit (EBF1/2-PIF3-CBF) that integrates light and freezing tolerance by integrating EBF1/2 (EIN3-BINDING F-BOX 1/2), PIF3 (PHYTOCHROME-INTERACTING FACTOR 3) and CBF (C-REPEAT BINDING FACTOR). In light,…

Cytokinin, one of the major plant hormones, is involved in many aspectis of plant growth and development. Over the last few decades, the biosynthetic and signaling pathways have been discovered. The mechanistic explanation to control a myriad array of gene expression is still a black box. Zubo et al.…