Liu et al. discover how members of the photosensory-signaling pathway orchestrate circadian clock gene expression to regulate plant responses to daily changes in the light environment. Plant Cell https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.19.00981  Background: Plants use an endogenous time-keeping mechanism known…

Early during seedling development and throughout their lives, plants sense and adapt to their constantly changing environment. Germinated seedlings perceive light which triggers a major developmental switch ultimately leading to photoautotrophic growth. This complex process, referred to broadly as photomorphogenesis,…

Claudio Calvaruso, first author of Specific Lhc proteins are bound to PSI or PSII supercomplexes in the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana Current Position: PhD candidate at the Institut für Molekulare Biowissenschaften, Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany Education: PhD candidate at the Goethe…

An-Shan Hsiao, first author of An Intrinsically Disordered Protein Interacts with Cytoskeleton for Adaptive Root Growth under Stress Current Position: Postdoctoral scientist, University of Cambridge, UK Education: PhD in Plant Molecular Biology, The University of Hong Kong M.Sc. in Plant Biology,…

With COVID19 ravaging across the globe, the medicinal value of plants and related research fields e.g., phytochemistry, ethnobotany, etc., is presently in focus. The drug development chain, though extremely promising, is not an immediate solution as it is a long, multistep process. Nature Plants highlights…

What are the chances that homologs of a vital animal protein could be found in plants, and how much structural and functional similarity would they share? These questions led to the discovery of Calcineurin B-like (CBL) and CBL-interacting protein kinase (CIPK) protein families in plants. In this review,…

Throughout evolutionary time polyploidization events have occurred frequently, increasing the gene copy number (gene dosage) of multiple angiosperms. The gene balance hypothesis proposes that there is selection on gene copy number to maintain the stoichiometric balance between dosage-sensitive genes…

The vascular cambium, a meristematic tissue responsible for xylem and phloem production, is an ancestral trait in angiosperms, however, its loss has independently occurred in at least 5 flowering plant lineages. One of such is the Nymphaeales, which includes Nymphaea thermarum, an emergent model for…