Recent Posts

Purple is the New Orange: Anthocyanin Regulation Coming Together in Carrot

Western cultivated carrot (Daucus carota subsp. sativus L) is broadly known for its orange pigmentation and accumulation of carotenoids, known as the carotene group (var. sativus). However, the eastern wild carrot (subsp. carota) originating from southwestern Asia over a century ago provides purple pigmentation…

Seeing the Cell Wall in a New Light

Sidney L. Shaw Dept. of Biology (and Physics), Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 sishaw@indiana.edu   How cell expansion is controlled to achieve a specific cell morphology remains one of the frontier questions in plant biology.  The carefully guided extension of the plant…

Buffering lipid synthesis by conditional inhibition

Author: Trevor H. Yeats, Email: thy6@cornell.edu Plant Breeding & Genetics Section, School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University, Ithaca NY USA (Commentary on Liu et al.) Lipid synthesis is a ubiquitous, but costly branch of primary metabolism in plants. All cells must make…

NPR1 has everything under control

Amna Mhamdi Ghent University, Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, and VIB Center for Plant Systems Biology, 9052 Ghent, Belgium Address correspondence to amna.mhamdi@psb.ugent.be NONEXPRESSER OF PR GENES 1 (NPR1) controls plant immunity and is key to salicylic acid (SA)-dependent…

Liguleless1, a conserved gene regulating leaf angle and a target for yield improvement in wheat

A major challenge in modern agriculture is to increase crop yield with diminishing agricultural land to feed the fast-growing global population. The erect leaf phenotype is a highly desirable trait that allows for higher planting density and maximizes light interception capacity and thus increases photosynthetic…

Enhancing wheat Rubisco activase thermostability by mutagenesis of conserved residues from heat-adapted species

Maria Grazia Annunziata Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, 14476 Potsdam-Golm, Germany. Annunziata@mpimp-golm.mpg.de ORCID ID: 0000-0001-8593-1741 Rubisco (ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase) is the central enzyme of photosynthetic carbon assimilation in the…

Burying your head in the sand: heading belowground to find future targets of selection in roots

Author: Skelton, Robert Paul skelrob@berkeley.edu Institution: Department of Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720. Burying one’s head in the sand is usually synonymous with avoiding an issue, but in this volume of Plant Physiology Colombi et al. (2019)…

Keep sugar away to stay active: glycosylation of methyl salicylate shuts down systemic signaling

Plant hormones are frequently modified by glycosylation, hydroxylation, methylation and other conjugations, and these modifications can alter the hormone’s activity and stability (Wang et al., 2019). The phytohormone salicylic acid orchestrates effective defense and mediates local and systemic-acquired…

A rice transcription factor controls grain length through cell number

Providing around 20% of global calories, rice (Oryza sativa) is one of the most important staple crops (Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP), 2013). With consumption particularly increasing in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, it is vital to increase rice yields to supply the…