Most students learn that metabolism does not increase at the same rate as an animal’s size – an elephant eats much less per unit of body mouse than a mouse does. This non-linear scaling, described through metabolic scaling theory, also occurs in plants – the growth rate of large plants is relatively…

Salicylic acid is a small phenolic hormone that plays a prominent role in the regulation of plant immune responses. Exactly how SA is perceived in planta has been an intensive area of research, with differential paradigms proposed for the perception of SA through negative regulators NPR3/NPR4 or through…

Magnaporthe oryzae is a devastating fungal pathogen that routinely threatens rice crop yields. Rice blast infection occurs when fungal hyphae penetrate into and proliferate within living plant cells, moving intracellulary from cell-to-cell through plasmodesmatal junctions. In a recent article published…

Review: A newly proposed plastid: the xyloplast ($) In its simplest definition, a plastid is an organelle that manufactures and stores essential chemical compounds used by its host cell. Numerous plastids exist beyond the familiar chloroplast. Chromoplasts synthesise and store carotenoid pigments,…

The discovery of semidwarfing genes in wheat and rice was a crucial turning point of the Green Revolution in the late 1960s. The Green Revolution aimed to maintain per capita food supplies worldwide despite the projected doubling of global population by the end of the 20th century. Its main features…

By Peter Ulvskov and Jesper Harholt For the first time in a very long time, a new polysaccharide is reported in plants. Roberts et al. (2018) discovered an arabinoglucan in the moss Physcomitrella patens. This discovery came about not as a result of biochemical characterization of the moss cell…

Toh et al. screened more than 20,000 chemicals from chemical libraries for compounds that regulate stomatal movement. They used Commelina benghalensis for their screen, as its stomata are about twice as large as those in Arabidopsis thaliana. They identified nine compounds that inhibited stomatal opening…

A bean leaf might not look big to us, but to a bacterium it is huge: authors Remus-Emsermann and Schlechter point out that in terms of scale, a microbe is to a leaf as a human is to the island of Trinidad. Like an island, a leaf has diverse inhabitants and provides diverse microhabitats. Much of what…