Samach et al. use a pigment-based visual assay to explore the repair of double-stranded DNA breakd in plants. https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad209 Avraham Levy and Aviva Samach, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. Background:  Plant breeding is the art of combining desirable traits…

Behind manuscripts are researchers, professors, professionals and students dedicated to advancing the field of plant science. You’ve seen our First Authors on Twitter and Facebook— now, read more about why they chose to pursue plant sciences and click on the links below the pictures to read their…

Sun et al. investigated genes related to gibberellin biosynthesis in the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha and found them to be critical for far-red light responses. The Plant Cell (2023).  https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad216 By Rui Sun and Takayuki Kohchi (Kyoto University) Background: The…

This is an excellent article to wrap up this year and lead us into the future. Introducing a special issue of Plant Cell Physiology, Nakajima et al. summarize an exciting collection of papers that look at diverse ways that plant biology can be enhanced through “human-machine collaborations”. Some…

Plants produce many specialized metabolites that are often associated with increased plant fitness. Metabolic genome wide association studies (mGWAS) identify enzymes involved in specialized metabolite biosynthesis. However, this relies on identifying metabolites from mass spectrometry data which is…

Imagine the everyday delights of foods like bread, ramen, or sushi. Central to these culinary staples is starch, a product of the photosynthesis process in plants. Despite its critical role, people still do not fully understand the regulation and biogenesis of the photosynthesis machinery. In this study,…

Auxin is a pleiotropic plant hormone with diverse functions, many of which are mediated through transcriptional reprograming. However, some auxin responses occur extremely rapidly, ruling out changes in transcription as a mechanism. In 2022, one of the components of an auxin receptor, F-box protein TIR1/AFB,…

Much of our understanding of the molecular underpinning that control shoot architecture comes from studies of annual plants such as Arabidopsis, pea, and rice. This new work by Su et al. investigates shoot branching in a long-lived tree, silver birch (Betula pendula). They started with a naturally occurring…