The transition between vegetative and reproductive stages in the plant life cycle implies a change in the developmental program of the shoot apical meristem to stop developing leaves and start developing floral buds. The factors that allow this transition to happen are many and the underlying mechanisms…

IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach [email protected] Green may have been the Pantone Color of the Year for 2013 (http://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2013), but 2016 was a great year for papers on chlorophyll research, at The Plant Cell and beyond. In this year, we saw a pile of interesting papers examining…

In Plant Physiology Preview you can get a head start on reading the excellent set of articles from a forthcoming special issue on Pollen Biology. Updates and research articles cover all aspects of this crucial part of reproductive biology, from the complex cell biology that underpins polar growth of…

We’ve highlighted some of the Plant Cell papers that were widely shared, liked, blogged, retweeted and otherwise garnered high-levels of attention this year. Perhaps you can use some holiday-season quiet time to catch up on those you missed. Reviews and Perspectives Creating order from chaos: epigenome…

IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart [email protected] Most plants are hermaphrodites, producing perfect flowers with both male and female functions. In roughly 6% of plants, however, male (usually XY) plants produce only male flowers and female (XX) plants produce only female flowers. These dioecious plants…

We’ve highlighted some of the Plant Physiology papers that were widely shared, liked, blogged, retweeted and otherwise garnered high-levels of attention this year. Perhaps you can use some of that holiday-season quiet time to catch up on those you missed. The breakaway attention-getter from Plant…

Farming mutualisms, in which an organism benefits from another to promote growth, have evolved in many lineages. In particular, symbioses between plants and ants are mostly defensive mutualisms. In this paper, Chomicki and Renner describe the obligate mutualism observed between epiphytes in the genus…

Pitcher plants are carnivorous, similar to Venus fly traps.  However, pitcher plants have fluid-filled modified leaves instead of the movable lobes found on Venus fly traps.  The pitcher plant’s modified leaf contains bacteria-laden water that traps small insects, but how are the insects trapped…