There is ample evidence for the impacts of plant microbiomes to plant growth and metabolism, but there are also challenges to obtaining reproducible data. In a first of its kind multi-laboratory microbiome reproducibility study, researchers from five groups across three continents used prefabricated…

Review: Beautiful mutations This is an interesting and engaging review article, written by a team from Bayer US Crop Science, on how mutations (broadly defined) have benefited plant domestication and breeding. While it briefly covers the basics, such as population genetics, it really focuses on demystifying…

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…

Agriculture contributes substantially to climate change. Many agricultural interventions have been suggested as opportunities to lower this impact, through CO2 sequestration or through reducing emissions of CO2 and CH4. This review by Vickers and Zerbe lays out how to use Fermi calculations to identify…

This very interesting preprint by Fernández Burda et al. investigates how well large-language models (LLMs, such as ChatGPT) are able to correctly answer questions about plant molecular biology. The article is a huge group effort that engaged the help of over 100 plant scientists to develop MoBioPlant…

Pangenomes are amazing resources that provide glimpses into evolution that no single genome can capture. This new article by Dong et al. is a treat, as it describes the findings from a compilation of 138 bryophyte genomes, of which 123 are newly sequenced. Bryophytes are non-vascular plants (mosses,…

Photosynthesis is nature’s most powerful carbon capture system, fueling life on Earth and inspiring new strategies for sustainable agriculture. In plants, The Calvin–Benson–Bassham cycle generates C3 carbohydrates but is inefficient at producing the two-carbon acetyl–coenzyme A (CoA), which is…

Stomata play an important role in balancing the amount of CO2 that goes in the plant for photosynthesis and the amount of water that goes out of the plant through transpiration. Stomatal density (SD) in plants has been studied with the goal of improving water-use efficiency (WUE) without sacrificing…