This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Arabidopsis genome, a milestone that lives large in those of us who experienced it and eagerly envisioned how this new knowledge would be used. The May 2025 issue of The Plant Cell focuses on how research on this little model plant has translated…

Rewiring sugar signaling for global agriculture: A decade of progress in harnessing the T6P pathway While sugar signaling plays a crucial role in grain filling and ultimately determines grain crop yield, direct genetic manipulation often results in pleiotropic effects and raises legislative…

The United Nations projects that by 2050, global food production must increase by 60% to meet growing demand, a goal that must be met under the pressures of global climate change and without further agricultural land expansion. With rising atmospheric CO₂ levels, Rubisco has emerged as the primary…

As both the power and accessibility of single-cell RNA sequencing increases, more reference datasets have become available, documenting the transcriptome within a variety of model plants. While invaluable resources that have pushed science forward, these datasets are often limited to single tissues or…

We can be assured that every biology student is exposed to plants at least once, when they learn about the genetic laws that Mendel formulated from his studies on peas. His classic work focused on seven traits that exhibited simple dominant-recessive characteristics, such as seed color and shape and…

Flowering in Arabidopsis thaliana is governed by complex genetic and epigenetic networks. A central component of this regulation is the floral repressor FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC), whose expression is modulated by histone modifications, particularly the activating H3K36me3 and the repressive H3K27me3 marks.…

Rice is one of the most important food crops globally, providing more than 20% of the world’s calorie intake and over 75% for the population in Asia. Therefore, apart from yield, grain quality is another critical agronomic trait for breeding and improvement, especially under stressful environmental…

I’m sure many of you have experienced frustration when trying to access an intriguing dataset that either doesn’t exist, isn’t open, or is set up in an impossibly unintuitive manner. Part of that problem stems from a lack of training of early-career scientists in how to make their data findable,…