This is an excellent article to wrap up this year and lead us into the future. Introducing a special issue of Plant Cell Physiology, Nakajima et al. summarize an exciting collection of papers that look at diverse ways that plant biology can be enhanced through “human-machine collaborations”. Some…

Plants produce many specialized metabolites that are often associated with increased plant fitness. Metabolic genome wide association studies (mGWAS) identify enzymes involved in specialized metabolite biosynthesis. However, this relies on identifying metabolites from mass spectrometry data which is…

Imagine the everyday delights of foods like bread, ramen, or sushi. Central to these culinary staples is starch, a product of the photosynthesis process in plants. Despite its critical role, people still do not fully understand the regulation and biogenesis of the photosynthesis machinery. In this study,…

Auxin is a pleiotropic plant hormone with diverse functions, many of which are mediated through transcriptional reprograming. However, some auxin responses occur extremely rapidly, ruling out changes in transcription as a mechanism. In 2022, one of the components of an auxin receptor, F-box protein TIR1/AFB,…

Much of our understanding of the molecular underpinning that control shoot architecture comes from studies of annual plants such as Arabidopsis, pea, and rice. This new work by Su et al. investigates shoot branching in a long-lived tree, silver birch (Betula pendula). They started with a naturally occurring…

Unlike legumes, which form symbiotic associations with nitrogen-fixing bacteria (diazotrophs), high-yielding cereal crops are usually supplemented with inorganic fertilizers that are both energetically and environmentally problematic. Some non-legumes can obtain nitrogen from associations with free-living…

Some people cannot eat wheat because they are sensitive to gluten, which is a proteinaceous network of glutenins and gliadins. Gliadins are divided into four classes, ω, γ, α, and β, with ω- and γ-gliadins being the most toxic to gluten sensitive individuals. Hence, there is interest in reducing…

Volatile molecules released from plant roots (root VOCs, rVOCs) can diffuse over long distances, thereby increasing the sphere of plant influence. However, their influence on complex soil microbial communities (or microbiomes) and ecological implications are poorly understood, mainly due to technical…