Category: Plant Physiology: News and Views

Tessa Moses The Institute of Quantitative Biology, Biochemistry and Biotechnology (IQB3), The King’s Buildings, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3BF, United Kingdom. E-mail: Tessa.Moses@ed.ac.uk, ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9366-4727 WRKY1 is a member of the WRKY transcription factor family…

Author: Robert P Skelton1 skelrob@berkeley.edu Affiliation: Dept. of Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA  Global demand for food security places an emphasis on a need to improve crop yield. The complexity of plant development and its interaction…

Kim L Johnson La Trobe Institute for Agriculture & Food, Department of Animal, Plant and Soil Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3086, Australia In September 2019 hurricane Dorian swept across to the southeast coast of the USA and strong winds and downpours led to major crop…

Emily R Larson, emily.larson@bristol.ac.uk Vesicle transport is one of those molecular processes that is easy to take for granted. From cell expansion and polarised growth to protein regulation and signalling, vesicle trafficking plays its unsung part. We tend to believe that we know a lot about this…

Lynn GL Richardson lynnr@msu.edu Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 Chloroplasts, like their cyanobacterial ancestors, use binary fission to divide and generate new organelles. The origins of the division machinery stem from both the original eukaryotic…

Scott Hayes, S.hayes@cnb.csic.es The adoption of Arabidopsis thaliana as a model plant in the early 1980s led to a revolution in plant molecular genetics. Its diminutive size, rapid generation time and small genome made Arabidopsis a fantastic tool, allowing us to build a complex picture of the genetic…

Raimund Nagel Universität Leipzig Department of Plant Physiology Leipzig, Saxony 04103 Germany raimund.nagel@uni-leipzig.de Dalmatian chrysanthemum (Tanacetum cinerariifolium) contains pyrethrins, which are highly effective natural insecticides that are nontoxic to most animals and biodegradable.…

The yield of key food crops (i.e., wheat [Triticum aestivum], rice [Oryza sativa], maize [Zea mays], and sorghum [Sorghum biocolor]) relies on their production of seeds, while the propagation of almost all crops is seed-dependent. Seed set in turn relies on the production of flowers containing the male…