Dr. Raimund Nagel Iowa State University Plants produce a plethora of natural products that function as defensive compounds are frequently used by humans for medicinal purposes. A majority of these natural products, however, are either found in low concentrations, in slow growing plants, or are…

Dorota Kawa, first author of SnRK2 protein kinases and mRNA decapping machinery control root development and response to salt Current Position: Postdoctoral researcher, Plant Biology & Genome Center, University of California, Davis Education: PhD University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2017);…

Meisha Holloway-Phillips Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland m.holloway-phillips@unibas.ch Since Terashima and Saeki (1983) demonstrated that light attenuation through the leaf was accompanied by spectral changes, there has been increasing interest in how light…

Elisa Dell'Aglio, first author of Identification of the Arabidopsis calmodulin-dependent NAD+ kinase that sustains the elicitor-induced oxidative burst Current Position: Research Assistant INSA-INRA Lyon (France) Education: PhD in Plant Biochemistry Non-scientific Interests: science journalism,…

If you’ve ever spoken publicly about GM crops, you’ve probably heard people express concern about how eating GM crops might affect their health. Smyth lays out a positive case for the human health benefits of GM crops, which will be a useful resource for science communicators. Here he focuses on…

Maize kernels have a triploid endosperm and a diploid embryo. Storage reserves move from the endosperm to the embryo as it grows. Mutants have been identified with abnormal embryos but normal endosperms, although usually a defective endosperm prevents normal embryo formation. Here Zheng and Li et al.…

In the absence of light, plants undergo skotomorphogenesis, characterized by longer hypocotyls, closed and yellowish cotyledons, and apical hooks. in the presence of light, they undergo photomorphogenesis, with inhibited hypocotyl elongation, and open and expanded green cotyledons. Light also modulates…

Multiple approaches like T-DNA insertion and small RNA- and CRISPR-Cas9 mediated gene silencing/knockdown are used to alter the expression of specific genes. This allows researchers to understand gene function during plant development or under any physiological condition. The most challenging task in…