A seedling in the dark produces ethylene, which in a dicot such as Arabidopsis leads to apical hook formation that protects the cotyledons from damage as the seedling pushes through the soil. The emergence of the seedling into the soil causes a rapid transition to photomorphogenesis and a suppression…

Seed vitality is critical for plants’ evolutionary survival and food production by economic crops such as rice, wheat, etc. Seed formation is preceded by well-coordinated events involving mainly fertilization, endosperm and seed coat formation in chronological order. How is the signal relayed from…

Youssef et al. investigate how the vsr2 mutant affects inflorescence (spike) development in barley. In the two-row variety, at each node there are two sterile spikelets and a single grain forms. In the six-row variety, each of the spikelets is fertile and three grains form at each node. The vsr2 mutation…

A metabolon is a physical clustering of metabolic pathway proteins. Until now, evidence for metabolons has been patchy, but Laursen et al. convincingly demonstrate the physical association of several enzymes involved in the production of dhurrin, a defense compound of sorghum. They use a method involving…

Nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria such as Anabaena sp. PCC 7120 have the challenge of supporting nitrogenase, an enzyme that is highly sensitive to oxygen, and simultaneously photosynthesis, an oxygen-producing set of reactions. They accomplish this by segregating these reactions into two cells, heterocysts…

The yield of a maize plant is correlated with the size, shape and number of kernels it produces. Miller et al. have developed an automated system to quantify these crucial attributes from photographs of kernels both on and off the cob. Their methods will enable researchers and breeders to record…

Unravelling the mechanism and signals originating from roots and able to contribute to stomatal control has been the subject of research for decades. In this commentary, Tardieu summarizes and discusses many studies and models on root-shoot signals, including work in the same issue by Visentin et…

In an interesting and accessible review, Peyraud et al. provide a big-picture view of how systems biology can be used to address plant-pathogen interactions. They describe the core interactions scaling from molecular to ecosystem / environment, and describe the different types of models that can…