Field-based technologies are essential for understanding plant mechanical behavior in field-relevant contexts. This behavior can be elastic, with temporary deformation measured as stiffness, or plastic, with permanent deformation measured as strength. While field-based technologies exist for addressing…

Up to 40% of harvested broccoli never reaches consumers due to quality losses during senescence, including yellowing and nutrient degradation. Reactive oxygen species cause oxidative stress within the plant, accelerating these negative changes through the jasmonate (JA) pathway.  Gage et al.  investigated…

C4 photosynthesis, an adaptive mechanism to spatially concentrate CO2 around Rubisco to enhance carbon fixation, has evolved independently at least 60 times in plants. This process spatially separates the initial carbon fixation by PEPC and carbon reduction by Rubisco, which requires that compounds move…

The transition of plants from aquatic to terrestrial environments occurred approximately 400 million years ago, leading to the diversification of two major lineages: tracheophytes (vascular plants) and bryophytes (non-vascular plants). While most studies on plant adaptation to environmental stressors…

Plants have several types of light receptors that control various responses to light, such as leaf expansion, time-of-flowering, and hypocotyl elongation. When seeds are germinated in the dark, their hypocotyl elongates rapidly because darkness is perceived as being deep underground; the elongation is…

Membrane contact sites (MCSs) serve a critical role in intracellular communication, particularly between organelle membranes, enabling direct molecular transfer. Less clear is the role MCSs play in intercellular communication. New evidence from Pérez-Sancho et al. implicates plasmodesmata in this function…

Developmental transitions in plants are tightly regulated by transcriptional networks that require fine-tuned temporal and spatial control, with noncoding sequences in gene promoters playing a key role. The conserved transcriptional regulator UNUSUAL FLORAL ORGANS (UFO) is essential for floral development.…

This preprint wins the award for “most beautiful paper” this week. Xu, Lin et al. carried out an expression analysis of developing wheat spikes at three developmental stages, using both single-cell RNA sequencing and single-molecule fluorescence in situ hybridization (smFISH). The wheat spike is…