Starch granules are synthesized in the leaves of chloroplast during the day and degraded in the subsequent night. To visualise starch granules the tissue usually has to be fixed, which prevents live imaging. Here Ichikawa et al. set out to find a highly specific dye to image starch granules in living…

Carrots were not always orange, and a new paper by Coe, Bostan, Rolling et al. sheds new light into the history of carrot domestication and improvement, i.e., how we went from white, knotty carrots to the orange, smooth ones that are now consumed all over the world. The authors published a new version…

With atmospheric CO2 levels increasing 100 times faster than historical levels, much attention has been paid to how crop plants respond to this elevated CO2 (eCO2). For angiosperms, eCO2 leads to increased CO2 assimilation and decreased photorespiration, but over time plants can adapt, leading to lower…

Sometime in the Cretaceous period (dinosaur time!), some monocots acquired a special pathway for carbon fixation, rendering them more efficient particularly in hot or dry environments. In most monocots, carbon is fixed by Rubisco in the mesophyll cells. In the innovative pathway, carbon fixation is split…

In Latin, dirigere means “to align or guide”, so in 1997 when a protein was identified that guides the stereoselectivity of another enzyme it was named as a dirigent protein. Subsequent studies found that the Arabidopsis genome encodes 25 dirigent proteins (DPs). In this new work, Gao et al. characterized…

Benzoxazinoids (BXs) are alkaloid specialized metabolites produced by important crops like maize. Their role in shaping the root and rhizosphere microbiomes and in plant defense against pest and pathogens is well known, although the mechanism remains unknown. One of the major BXs produced by maize is…

Recent years have seen a reevaluation of the history and practice of science, including reconsidering who is recognized and why. Science doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it reflects the culture and values of those that practice it. This article, by Mabry et al., is intended to serve as a conversation starter…

Review: Till death do us pair: Co-evolution of plant–necrotroph interactions This interesting and well-written review by Derbyshire and Raffaele takes a step back from the molecular interactions between plant and pathogen and discusses them in light of co-evolutionary processes. The review starts…