Elucidating the pathways in which plants can recognize and respond to heat stress is a key step in developing more resilient plants and crops. Work by Li et al. provides a more in-depth understanding of the early factors in heat stress-responsive (HSR) gene expression in Arabidopsis. They first identified…

When we talk of pollination, we often imagine colorful flowers and scents that attract insects to the flowers. However, flowers are a hallmark of angiosperms. How cone-bearing gymnosperms attract their pollinators has been a long-standing question. In a recent study, Valencia-Montoya et al. investigated…

One of the main challenges in plant virology is detecting the active replicase enzyme of positive-strand RNA viruses in living cells, since adding fluorescent tags often prevents it from functioning. A recent study in Plant Physiology by Ishihara et al. has found a way around this problem. The researchers…

Plant pathogens often succeed not by brute force, but by subtly rewiring host developmental programs. Ustilago maydis, the basidiomycete fungus responsible for maize common smut, exemplifies this strategy by inducing tumor-like galls on aerial organs of its host. Although the U. maydis genome encodes…

Founders review: Forty years of research into hormone mimics, inhibitors, and agrochemicals This review, by Tadao Asami, looks back at his career as a scientist who designs and synthesizes small, physiologically active molecules with applications in research and agriculture.  It’s an impressive…

Recently, a team of agricultural economists (Pardey et al.) released a powerful commentary about the state of agricultural research funding, which they say is insufficient. They observe that, fueled in part by the changing climate, food prices are rising everywhere, but they are forecast to rise…

Many factors contribute to global hunger, but progress in many sensible directions such as lowering waste and improving distribution has been negligible; furthermore, the ever growing challenges of climate change continue to hinder food production. Photosynthesis is a critical yet inefficient process…

Reading this review brought to mind some well-known lyrics starting “You don’t know what you’ve got …”  Joni Mitchell followed with “till its gone,” whilst Blink-182 suggested “till it’s almost gone”. A major challenge for plant scientists today is to find out what we have before…