Category: Research

Jennifer Wisecaver, featured first author of A Global Co-expression Network Approach for Connecting Genes to Specialized Metabolic Pathways in Plants Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University. Education: PhD (2012) Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,…

Eukaryotic pathogens are responsible for devastating plant diseases that threaten food supplies globally – think potato blight caused by the oomycete Phytophora infestans, rice blast caused by the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae, and wheat stem rust caused by the fungus Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici.…

This week's What We're Reading is curated by Sridhar Gutam, Senior Scientist, Indian Council of Agricultural Research and Nidhi Sharma, Research Specialist, Stanford University. Nidhi Sharma is a researcher in Dominique Bergmann's lab at Stanford University. She graduated from The University of…

Liu et al. uncover a direct link between calcium signaling and a plant immune receptor http://www.plantcell.org/content/29/4/746.abstract Plants have evolved a sophisticated system to defend against pathogen attack that involves recognition of an invading pathogen and activation of the immune system.…

Gallegos and Rose investigate how introns affect transcript initiation http://www.plantcell.org/content/29/4/843.abstract. For the information stored in the DNA of genes to be converted into functional protein products, first a molecular copy of the information called messenger RNA is made, using…

Yamauchi et al. study the formation of aerenchyma in rice – spongy tissue filled with air spaces that develop in roots of wetland plants http://www.plantcell.org/content/29/4/775.abstract Plants, like animals, need oxygen for respiration (the metabolic process of breaking down sugars to get energy).…

The June 2017 issue of Plant Physiology is a Focus Issue on stomata; here is the editorial overview to this issue by Michael R. Blatt, Plant Physiology, Editor-in-Chief, and Tim J. Brodribb and Keiko U. Torii, Plant Physiology Editors. Small Pores with a Big Impact The guard cells surrounding stomatal…

Obtaining genomics and other –omics datasets is now routine and widely used across all biological systems, including plants. As a consequence, a wide range of plant species are being interrogated at the genome, epigenome, transcriptome, translatome, and proteome level, leading to new hypotheses about…