Plant development depends on the precise regulation of cell wall mechanics, largely controlled by the methylesterification status of pectin. Although pectin remodeling is known to influence cell expansion and tissue integrity, how its modification is spatially and temporally regulated during cell division…

Agrobacterium tumefaciens, through its natural capacity to deliver foreign DNA into plant genomes, has enabled efficient transformation across many plant species and cultivars. Despite these advancements, persistent challenges remain, including genotype-dependent recalcitrance, potential off-target DNA…

Distant hybridization is an important route for crop improvement, enabling the transfer of disease resistance and stress tolerance from wild relatives, but in Brassicaceae it is strongly restricted by stigma-based interspecific incompatibility. While self-incompatibility (SI) signaling via SCR–SRK…

Directed evolution aims to identify variants of a gene of interest (GOI) with improved or novel functions by accelerating mutation and selection under experimental conditions. However, in planta platforms have been hindered by slow plant cell division. Recently, Zhu et al. introduced the geminivirus…

In nature, plants often face multiple attackers simultaneously, giving rise to complex three-way interactions that can reshape defense outcomes in unexpected ways. An intriguing example comes from observations that prior aphid infestation, or even pretreatment with aphid honeydew, suppresses the jasmonic…

This is the last edition of PSRW before the new year. Although we have spent the past year celebrating the breakthroughs in plant science, I am going to end on a more sober note, which is succinctly captured in this important special report from Ripple et al. The authors pull together data from across…

Commentary: Fund food research now 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,…

This review by Rai et al., part of a focus collection on metabolism, comprehensively covers the role of metabolomics in plant biology: its history, its tools and techniques, and its impact. As the authors point out, metabolomics bridge the gap between genotype and phenotype by providing a direct readout…