Bentham, De la Concepcion et al. fine-tuned a plant immune receptor pair to allow for engineering new specificities while avoiding autoactivation. https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad204 Adam R Bentham, Mark J Banfield Department of Biochemistry and Metabolism, John Innes Centre, Norwich Research…

Liu et al. identify two proteins that repress flowering by acting on the florigen activation complex. https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad190 Background: Timely flowering is critical for plant reproductive success. FLOWERING PROMOTING FACTOR1 (FPF1), a small protein without any known domains, has…

This review by Cui et al. makes the interesting comparison between the developmental processes involved in root nodule formation and haustoria formation by roots of parasitic plants. As the authors observe, both are organs that are produced for the purpose of nutrient acquisition through “intimate…

Without doubt, Arabidopsis thaliana has thoroughly demonstrated its usefulness as a model species. In this interesting article by Mabry et al. (with an impressive author list!), the authors propose to expand the Arabidopsis toolkit to encompass its entire order – its family of families, the Brassicales.…