Matteo Grenzi, co-first author of "Simultaneous imaging of ER and cytosolic Ca2+ dynamics reveals long-distance ER Ca2+ waves in plants" Current position: PhD student, Department of Biosciences, University of Milan (Italy) Education: B.Sc. in Biology and M.Sc. in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology,…

Liu et al. demonstrate how manipulating ZmEXPA4 gene expression in developing maize ears alleviates the prolonged anthesis and silking interval in response to drought. The Plant Cell (2021) https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koab083  By Boxin Liu and Feng Qin Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of…

This letter by Katelyn Butler, Carina Collins, and Jennifer Robison is the 5th in our series on diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM disciplines. Read the editorial call for letters here: Sowing the seeds of equity and diversity in academia and STEM disciplines. Butler K, Collins C, Robison J…

Small RNAs have big effects and can serve to shut down or silence gene expression. Recently, studies have found that small RNAs can contribute to plant defense beyond the boundary of the plant, by being packed into extracellular vesicles (EVs) and delivered to a pathogen. Cai et al. review our current…

Covid has turned our focus to human viral pathogens, but the challenges we face from cellular pathogens has not gone away, and is increasingly exacerbated by the development of resistance to antibiotics and other antimicrobials. This fine review by Tiwari et al. provides an overview of how antimicrobials…

PHYTOCHROME INTERACTING FACTORS (PIFs) play a pivotal role in mediating the responses of plants to various environmental stimuli. Although the importance of PIFs in shade avoidance response is well known, the relative contributions of different PIFs have not been discretely determined. In a recent study,…

A long-standing premise in plant ecology is that seed mass and growth rate are negatively correlated, meaning that small-seeded species grow faster than large-seeded ones. However, this relationship remains controversial given that the most common measurement for growth rate –Relative Growth Rate (RGR)–…

The term gender scissor describes the distribution of men and women throughout their scientific career: while girls represent more than a half of the University students, the percentage of women in science markedly decreases beyond the PhD. This trend has been reported in different European Union member…