Many discussions about organic food production are dominated by dogma rather than pragmatism. Nevertheless, here’s a useful report that examines the impact of organic farming methods in England and Wales on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Are the well-documented lower yields offset by differences in…

Review: Exchange of small regulatory RNAs between plants and their pests Trans-species small RNAs are the latest class in the family of signals that move between plants and their attackers. Hudzik et al. review this topic, covering small RNAs that move from plant to pest and from pest to plant. The…

Sidney L. Shaw Dept. of Biology (and Physics), Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 sishaw@indiana.edu   How cell expansion is controlled to achieve a specific cell morphology remains one of the frontier questions in plant biology.  The carefully guided extension of the plant…

Chloroplast development in germinating seedlings initiates upon illumination. Whereas chloroplasts in true leaves develop directly from proplastids, chloroplasts in cotyledons of dark-grown seedlings develop from an intermediate type of plastid called an etioplast. During development, etioplasts accumulate…

Author: Trevor H. Yeats, Email: thy6@cornell.edu Plant Breeding & Genetics Section, School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University, Ithaca NY USA (Commentary on Liu et al.) Lipid synthesis is a ubiquitous, but costly branch of primary metabolism in plants. All cells must make…

One of the key aspects of pathogenesis is the ability to sabotage host defenses and, to this end, plant pathogens produce a remarkable set of effector proteins that target host defenses at multiple levels. Plants, in turn, have defenses to counteract these effectors; one key aspect of this is the ability…

Photosystem biogenesis in the chloroplast requires a concerted effort between synthesis and assembly of components including protein subunits, pigments, and other cofactors that varies both temporally and spatially. Sun, Valente-Paterno et al. (2019) investigate the translation zone (T-zone) of unicellular…

Liana T. Burghardt, co-first author of A 'Select and Resequence' approach reveals strain-specific effects of Medicago nodule-specific PLAT-domain genes Current Position: I am a post-doc in the Plant and Microbial Biology department at the University of Minnesota. In Spring 2020, I start my lab as an…