The ancestors of land plants were aquatic. Myriad changes accompanied the transition from aquatic to terrestrial life, including changes necessitated by the difference in light intensity and quality. Bryophytes, the earliest diverging land plants, have some characteristics that reveal how plants transitioned…

Nature has published an Outlook feature on the topic of Food Security with the following overview articles, all useful for teaching: Food security,   Nutrition: A world of insecurity,   Agrobiodiversity: The living library,   Bioengineering: Solar upgrade,  Egypt: Space to grow,  Perspective:…

Correspondence: Discussion about the US National Academies GE crop report ($) A series of letters has been published in Nature Biotechnology on the topic of the US National Academies report Genetically Engineered Crops: Experiences and Prospects. From Dec 2016, US National Academies report misses…

Glucosinolates are sulfur-containing defense compounds produced by brassica plants. Brassica napus (canola) is an important oilseed crop because a low-glucosinolate variety has been developed. Brassica juncea is more stress tolerant, but has not been developed as a crop due to its high levels of glucosinolates.…

Plant reproduction is particularly sensitive to heat stress, so rising temperature is a major threat to food security.  Zhang et al. surveyed the transcriptional responses to heat stress (3 h at 37º) in Arabidopsis and identified large differences between vegetative and reproductive tissue responses…

Photosynthesis in plants involves two photosystems acting in series, Photosystem I (PSI) and PSII. Each photosystem is a massive complex consisting of numerous proteins and pigments. The photosystems are efficient at light harvesting but also sensitive to high-light induced photooxidative damage. Photosynthetic…

The final step in the synthesis of chlorophyll is the joining of chlorophyllide, (a tetrapyrrole with planar structure similar to heme) to a linear lipid (a product of the terpenoid pathway) that provides an attachment point for the resulting chlorophyll to pigment-binding proteins of the light-harvesting…