Review: Plant small heat shock proteins – evolutionary and functional diversity (New Phytol.)
Plant Science Research WeeklyHeat shock proteins are rapidly induced by heat treatment and were among the first plant genes and proteins characterized in the early days of molecular biology, nearly 40 years ago. Waters and Vierling review the family of small heat shock proteins (sHSPs), which has been especially amplified in plants…
Review. Plant immunity: Danger perception and signaling (Cell)
Plant Science Research WeeklyResearch from the last three decades has discovered many genes and pathways involved in plant immunity and how they are connected. Here, Zhou and Zhang highlight new research regarding activation and signaling of cell surface pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) and intracellular nucleotide-binding,…
Review. The plant microbiome: From ecology to reductionism and beyond (Annu. Rev. Microbiol.)
Plant Science Research WeeklyThe last two decades have witnessed tremendous progress in our understanding of plant microbiota. Fitzpatrick, Salas-González et al. highlight recent discoveries from culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches and discuss the future path towards integrating these approaches. Culture-independent…
Convergent loss of plant immune receptors and signaling pathways (Plant Cell)
Plant Science Research WeeklyNucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors (NLRs) are important components of the plant immune system. They are intracellular receptors that act downstream of the cell-surface receptors, and initiate the so-called effector-triggered immunity (ETI). In most plants, the NLR gene family is large and…
Multidimensional gene regulatory landscape of a bacterial pathogen in plants (Nature Plants)
Plant Science Research WeeklyThe outcome of a plant-bacteria interaction is determined by the bacterial virulence and plant immune systems. Individually, these systems, and to an extent their interactions, have been well studied. However, certain aspects of their interactions remain elusive, particularly how plant immunity affects…
Major impacts of widespread structural variation on gene expression and crop improvement in tomato (Cell)
Plant Science Research WeeklyStructural Variants (SVs) are large genomic deletions, insertions, and duplications with underexplored roles in determining plant phenotypes. Recognizing the extent to which SVs define quantitative trait variation was previously constrained by the fact that popular short-read sequencing technologies…
The 3′ processing of antisense RNAs physically links to chromatin-based transcriptional control (PNAS)
Plant Science Research WeeklyIn Arabidopsis, multiple genetic pathways control the floral transition in response to external and internal stimuli. Among these, components of the autonomous pathway promote flowering by negatively regulating the central floral repressor FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC). Despite the wealth of information on…
Genome-wide analysis of the U-box E3 ubiquitin ligase enzyme gene family in tomato (Sci. Reports)
Plant Science Research WeeklyUbiquitination is a process of adding ubiquitin (a small regulatory protein) to a substrate protein, leading to its degradation. A wide variety of cellular processes necessary for plant growth and development are regulated by ubiquitination. E3 ubiquitin ligases are the largest family of proteins involved…
Highly active rubiscos discovered by systematic interrogation of natural sequence diversity (EMBO J)
Plant Science Research WeeklyThis is a fascinating and very well-written paper that investigates the diversity of rubisco's kinetic properties. Rubisco’s relationship with its substrate CO2 is complicated by its relationship with O2, and it has often been suggested that for this reason rubisco is locked into a slow rate of catalysis.…