Category: Plant Physiology: News and Views

Meisha Holloway-Phillips Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland m.holloway-phillips@unibas.ch When trees are subjected to soil water deficits, some leaves and branches show signs of stress or die before others in the canopy. Why is that? Here I highlight recent…

Magda Julkowska Magdalena.Julkowska@kaust.edu.sa   In response to stress, secondary messengers and rapid and reversible protein phosphorylation contribute to signaling cascades that generate unique signatures indicating stress type and severity. Activation of stress-induced signaling cascades…

When rays of light enter a plant cell, they find their way to the chlorophyll pigments located in the chloroplast. Chlorophyll molecules are embedded in the light reaction complexes photosystem I (PSI) and photosystem II (PSII), which capture and store the energy needed for carbon fixation in the Calvin…

For the past two decades, glyphosate has been the most used herbicide worldwide, resulting in prolonged, extreme selection pressure for glyphosate-resistant (GR) weeds.  Glyphosate’s only target as a herbicide is 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS), an enzyme of the shikimate pathway. …

Much like the spikes that deter birds from sitting on fences, trichomes — hair like projections on the leaf surface — are the epidermis’ first line of defence, discouraging insects and other pests (Levin, 1973). In addition to their role protecting the plant, trichomes are an excellent marker to…

Magdalena M. Julkowska Magdalena.Julkowska@kaust.edu.sa Improvement of crops using traditional breeding is too slow to ensure food production able to sustain the growing human population, especially in the face of climate change (Hickey et al., 2019). Transformation methods for monocot crops depend…

Magdalena M. Julkowska Magdalena.Julkowska@kaust.edu.sa Stomata are the gatekeepers of plant water status, regulating the balance between plant CO2 uptake and water loss. Stomatal conductance (gs) can be estimated by microscopy of wax or plastic leaf surface imprints, but this technique is time…

Author: Masanori Izumi Affiliation: RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, Wako 351-0198, Japan masanori.izumi@riken.jp Autophagy is the ubiquitous process in eukaryotes leading to the degradation of intracellular components, during which a portion of the cytoplasm, including organelles,…