Behind manuscripts are researchers, professors, professionals and students dedicated to advancing the field of plant science. You’ve seen our First Authors on Bluesky, Twitter, and Facebook— now, read more about why they chose to pursue plant sciences and click on the links below the pictures to…

Plants are sessile organisms and, unlike animals, cannot escape adverse environmental conditions. To cope with this limitation, they have evolved a complex surveillance system to detect and respond to fluctuating conditions such as resource scarcity, environmental changes, and pathogen attacks. Membrane-bound…

In their perspective article, “Life on the dry side: a roadmap to understanding desiccation tolerance and accelerating translational applications,” Marks et al. outline the current state and future promise of desiccation tolerance research. They define desiccation tolerance as “the ability to dry…

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Arabidopsis genome, a milestone that lives large in those of us who experienced it and eagerly envisioned how this new knowledge would be used. The May 2025 issue of The Plant Cell focuses on how research on this little model plant has translated…

Rewiring sugar signaling for global agriculture: A decade of progress in harnessing the T6P pathway While sugar signaling plays a crucial role in grain filling and ultimately determines grain crop yield, direct genetic manipulation often results in pleiotropic effects and raises legislative…

The United Nations projects that by 2050, global food production must increase by 60% to meet growing demand, a goal that must be met under the pressures of global climate change and without further agricultural land expansion. With rising atmospheric CO₂ levels, Rubisco has emerged as the primary…

As both the power and accessibility of single-cell RNA sequencing increases, more reference datasets have become available, documenting the transcriptome within a variety of model plants. While invaluable resources that have pushed science forward, these datasets are often limited to single tissues or…

We can be assured that every biology student is exposed to plants at least once, when they learn about the genetic laws that Mendel formulated from his studies on peas. His classic work focused on seven traits that exhibited simple dominant-recessive characteristics, such as seed color and shape and…