Cell wall tensile stress and turgor pressure are two important determinants of cell growth. Turgor pressure has been regarded as a passive contributor, however recent evidence reviewed by Ali et al. suggests that turgor is an emergent property that determines growth. Wall stress and turgor pressure are…

Nuclear DNA is inherited from both parents during sexual reproduction, but organellar DNA is (usually) exclusively received from the mother. However, stable biparental inheritance of organellar DNA has also been reported in plants and animals but its molecular mechanism is unknown. Using quantitative…

One of the current challenges in seed conservation is identifying the genetic basis that defines how long seeds can be stored before losing viability. This challenge is exceptionally crucial for rice, a cereal that feeds roughly half of the world's population. However, most studies looking for determinant…

Many plants have gone extinct in their natural habitat, but persist as samples preserved in herbaria around the globe. The existance of these samples raises questions about the possibility of using them to "bring back to life" these species, for example, by germinating the seeds or spores available in…

The CLAVATA1 receptor-like kinase and its ligand CLAVATA3 (CLV3) are associated with the CLAVATA-WUSCHEL pathway, which partly controls locule number (the seed-bearing structure of fruits). An increase in locule number is believed to increase the number of seeds and subsequently increase fruit size.…

Floods limit plant oxygen availability, impacting their growth and productivity. In hypoxia, the ERF-VII group of transcription factors are stabilized and activate Hypoxia-Responsive Genes (HRG) that prepare the plant to face the stress. In this situation, plant metabolism switches from oxidative phosphorylation…

Arsenic (As) contamination in soil influences the physio-chemical properties of plants. Majumdar et al. propose the use of rice biochar (RBC) doped with iron oxide (IO) nanoparticles, an eco-friendly composite, to minimize As toxicity in plants. Rice plants grown on As-contaminated soil with the composite…

Increasing plant resistance to specific pathogens through genome editing is a very active branch of crop engineering. In a recent paper, Veley et al. propose to edit the epigenome to boost resistance to cassava bacterial blight by increasing the levels of DNA methylation at specific sites, while leaving…