IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart [email protected] When a deer eats the primary shoot of a plant, this can activate a nearby dormant axillary bud, causing it to form a secondary shoot. Genetic and environmental factors also affect shoot architecture, which strongly influences crop productivity. Changes…

IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach [email protected] Movement of macromolecules through the plant phloem provides a mechanism for long-distance signaling that plants use in development, disease resistance, and other adaptive responses (reviewed in Spiegelman et al., 2013). For example, full-length RNAs, such…

IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart  [email protected] Investigating how plants grow and develop often requires a bit of creativity. For example, deep within the plant, the vascular cambium, a layer of embryonic, highly cytoplasmic cells, gives rise to xylem and phloem tissue, which must expand throughout…

Nemhauser and Torii define synthetic biology as “an engineering approach to design, build and analyize dynamic molecular devices and/or pathways from biological components to produce cells and organisms with customized functionality.” In their review, they describe several plant synthetic biology…

Many plant traits are multigenic, so engineering them requires modulating the expression of several genes simultaneously. Synthetic promoters and transcription factors offer such a possibility. For example, a cis-element can be introduced into the promoter of each gene of interest, and a synthetic transcription…

Raitskin and Patron review efforts to express multiple single guide RNA (sgRNAs) and Cas9 in plants for the coordinated expression of many genes. They argue for the need to create single plasmids carrying the sgRNAs and Cas9, using a Type IIS restriction endonuclease-mediated assembly method. Curr. Opin.…

Puchta reviews the different ways that CRISPR/Cas9 can be used in synthetic biolgy, beyond the common gene-editing function. For example, the Cas9 protein can be fused to other proteins that activate or repress transcription, and targeted to different promoters using guide RNAs. He further explores the…

Control of gene expression involves both activation and repression of transcription. Schaumberg et al. used transient expression in Arabidopsis and sorghum protoplasts and dual-luciferase outputs to rapidly quantitate synthetic repressors and repressible promoters, and verified their results in transgenic…