Category: Plant Physiology: News and Views

Pyrimidine nucleotides (e.g., dCTP, dTTP, UTP, and CTP) are essential building blocks for DNA and RNA synthesis in all organisms. In plants, sucrose and cell wall polymer synthesis depend on pyrimidine nucleotide-derived substrates, such as UDP-glucose, and important classes of membrane lipids are made…

Author: Masanori Izumi Affiliation: RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, Wako 351-0198, Japan Newly synthesized proteins must be folded to form their proper 3D structures. Stresses perturb protein folding, thereby leading to the hyperaccumulation of misfolded or aggregated proteins. Such…

Dr. Raimund Nagel Iowa State University Plants produce a plethora of natural products that function as defensive compounds are frequently used by humans for medicinal purposes. A majority of these natural products, however, are either found in low concentrations, in slow growing plants, or are…

Meisha Holloway-Phillips Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland m.holloway-phillips@unibas.ch Since Terashima and Saeki (1983) demonstrated that light attenuation through the leaf was accompanied by spectral changes, there has been increasing interest in how light…

Maria Grazia Annunziata Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, 14476 Potsdam-Golm, Germany. Lignin is a class of complex aromatic polymers particularly important in the formation of cell walls, especially in wood and bark. Lignin contributes to plant structure, support and defence…

Lynn GL Richardson Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 Positive strand (+) RNA viruses act as their own messengers, encoding an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase that can replicate their sense RNA genome. This allows (+)RNA viruses to replicate outside the…

Commentary by Maria Papanatsiou We live an era where omic approaches are essential to decode scientific hypotheses. Indeed, technological advances have accelerated science, resulting in a plethora of insights.  During the past decade, the plant science community has profited from using large and…

Amna Mhamdi, Ghent University, Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, and VIB Center for Plant Systems Biology, 9052 Ghent, Belgium Defense reactions are the fascinating result of a complex network between signals, receptors and effectors, where any missed nodes may spell disaster.…