Catriona Walker, first author of Integrated dominance mechanisms regulate reproductive architecture in Arabidopsis thaliana and Brassica napus Current Position: PhD student, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Education: MRes Plant Science (University of Glasgow), BSc Biology (University of Stirling) Non-scientific…

Seed priming is a family of presowing techniques that control water uptake in seeds, so they are dehydrated once metabolic activities have restarted but before the end of germination. Primed seeds have shown increased and more synchronized germination, especially under stressful conditions, making these…

Phylogenetic trees demonstrate the evolutionary relationship between organisms, but sometimes these relationships are described by inappropriate terminology. In this Viewpoint, McDaniel observes that based on a phylogeny as drawn here, bryophytes (represented by the genus Physcomitrella, aka Physcomitrium)…

The Rhynie chert holds some of the oldest and best-preserved fossils of vascular plants (Rhynie is a village in north-east Scotland, and chert is a type of sedimentary rock). Analysis of thin section of fossils from here have provided the earliest cellular details of “rhizoid-based rooting systems,…

Understanding cellular responses to the phytohormone auxin has always been a challenge and decades of work has constantly renewed our knowledge of the same. Here, Narasimhan and colleagues attempted to revisit and resolve the basis of differential action of naturally occurring auxin indole-3-acetic acid…

Photosystem II is a multisubunit enzyme complex in the thylakoid membranes of plant, algae, and cyanobacteria. Here, Zebret et al. used cryo-electron microscopy to produce high-resolution structural information of the intermediate complexes involved in the biogenesis and assembly of photosystem II from…

In Arabidopsis, flowering is promoted by the activation of the florigen FT in response to long days and by the accumulation of the phytohormone GA under short days (SD). Despite the extensive knowledge of regulatory networks involving FT, the molecular mechanism controlled by GA is still unresolved.…

It’s spring where I live and the air and my eyes are filled with pollen. The lucky few pollen grains that land on the stigmatic surface of a flower might germinate and deliver the sperm to the ovule, but there are many checkpoints even after their safe landing. Here, Liu et al. uncover one of the earliest…