Archana Kumari Srivastava, first author of MYC2 Regulates ARR16, a Component of Cytokinin Signaling Pathways, in Arabidopsis Seedling Development Current Position: Research Associate in Medical Research Department, Healthcare Division, Research & Development at Emami Ltd., India Education: Ph.D.…

Sylvain Aubry, first author of Pheophorbide a may regulate jasmonate signalling during dark-induced senescence Current Position: Senior Scientist at the University of Zürich, Switzerland Education: PhD in Molecular Plant Physiology. University of Zürich Non-scientific Interests: playing Raspberry…

Brumos and Zhao et al. developed an improved set of genetic tools to make precise sequence modifications in large DNA fragments and used them to tag hundreds of plant genes, including those involved in auxin production. Plant Cell https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.19.00431 By Javier Brumos, Anna Stepanova,…

Comment: Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against This Comment in Nature by Lenton et al. (leaders in climate study and policy) is making headlines, as it points to the serious implications of continuing climate change. It’s worth looking at the article itself, not just the digested version.…

Review: Design and engineering of advanced plant optogenetics systems Optogenetics uses light-sensitive proteins to trigger specific outputs in the cell in response to particular wavelengths of light. Many optogenetic systems use chimeric proteins that contain different sensor and effector…

Nitrogenases are large, multisubunit enzymes that require complex metal cofactors. They are the only enzymes capable of fixing N2 into usable form, and are only produced by some archaea and bacteria; “nitrogen-fixing” legumes actually depend on the presence of their bacterial symbionts for this function.…

The chromatin landscape is key in the regulation of gene expression. Many studies have been made in Arabidopsis, but its genomic architecture is different to other plants. Here Ricci et al. present a very comprehensive study of chromatin analysis in maize. This work includes a huge amount of sequencing…

With a wide range of genome sizes and varying architectures, understanding the evolution and function of non-coding regions is not straightforward in plants. Nevertheless, many advances are coming out that will shed light on this complex scientific problem. Lu et al. performed ATAC-seq to study chromatin…