In this essay, Richard Sever (founder of bioRxiv) provides a history of scholarly publishing, starting with the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions (1665). He then provides an overview of the current landscape: not-for-profit society publishers versus for-profit publishers; a breakdown of the real…

Gene expression regulation facilitates environmental adaptation and survival. This recent paper by Xiang et al. focuses on the regulation of translation, in particular on the mechanism underlying the generation of different translation products in different conditions. In addition to the main start codon…

In this interesting paper, Stritzer et al. asked a simple question, which required a very sophisticated approach to answer. Do transposable elements (TEs) affect fitness in maize? This is a particularly interesting question as 85% of the maize genome is composed of TEs or TE fragments, including over…

Gene editing in plants is a time-consuming process. One of the challenges of gene editing is to produce transgene-free plants. The transgenes required to carry out selection and editing, such as antibiotic resistance markers and editing enzymes, must be removed, while the edited part of the genome is…

Drought stress is a major problem and can cause large reductions in yield. Water productivity is the amount of yield per unit of water used, hence a higher water productivity is associated with more drought tolerance. Here, Zaïm et al. discovered three genomic loci associated with increased water productivity…

Rice is a globally important crop, therefore increasing yield without compromising quality is of much interest. A reduction in the amount of the TGW6 (THOUSAND-GRAIN WEIGHT 6) protein is associated with improved grain yield and quality in rice. However, we do not fully understand how TGW6 protein levels…

Witchweeds (Striga spp.) are parasitic plants. Like other weeds, they compete with food crops, but they do so very efficiently by penetrating host tissues and forming vascular connections. Through this effective extraction of nutrients and photosynthate from their hosts, Striga can literally wipe out…

Is it possible to summarize objectively the recent history of plant science? Shiu and Lehti-Shiu have used a combination of machine learning and language modeling to track terms used in plant science articles from the 1950s to now, as a strategy to understand how research topics and tools have evolved.…