Recent Posts

Post-transcriptional regulation of nutrient transporters

Author: Stefanie Wege ORCID: 0000-0002-7232-5889 stefanie.wege@adelaide.edu.au Affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, PRC, School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, Waite Research Institute, University of Adelaide, Waite Campus, Glen Osmond 5064, South Australia, Australia   Most…

Maize RNA Polymerase III Subunit NRPC2: New Kid on the Kernel Development Block

Dhineshkumar Thiruppathi 1,2  ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2018-3356 Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Saint Louis, Missouri 63132 1Senior author 2Author for contact: dthiruppathi@danforthcenter.org Seed (kernel) size affects evolutionary fitness and crop yield. In angiosperms, seed size…

Keeping a lid on shoot regeneration: SIZ1 suppresses wound-induced developmental reprogramming

Michael J. Skelly ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9024-0037 Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3BF, United Kingdom M.Skelly@ed.ac.uk Plants have the remarkable ability to regenerate tissues and organs in response to wounding. This…

Terpenes in cannabis: Solving the puzzle of how to predict taste and smell

Marc-Sven Roell1 ORCID ID: 0000-0003-2714-8729 1Institute of Plant Biochemistry, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Universitätsstrasse 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany marc-sven.roell@hhu.de Cannabis sativa (cannabis) is the cornerstone of the multi-billion-dollar legal marijuana industry.…

The photobiology paradox resolved: photoreceptors drive photosynthesis and vice-versa

Charlotte Gommers, Assistant Features Editor charlotte.gommers@wur.nl For a long time, the study of light fueled two independent fields of plant sciences. On the one hand, light energy is absorbed in the chloroplasts, to drive sugar production via photosynthesis. On the other hand, light is an…

True Blue: How Cry1 Inhibits Phototropism in Green Seedlings

Kasper van Gelderen Plant Ecophysiology, Dept. of Biology, Utrecht University, Padualaan 8 3584CH, Utrecht, The Netherlands. The study of plant movement towards light, also called phototropism, has a venerable history with giants such as Charles Darwin and Frits Went involved in its study, which…

Functional principal component analysis: a robust method for time-series phenotypic data

Molecular breeding relies on careful assessment of phenotypic traits linked to DNA markers so that causal genes can be identified and desirable crop alleles selected. Over the past decade, DNA markers have become abundant with the rapid advancement of next-generation sequencing technology, including…

Sensing Attack: The Role of Wall-associated Kinases in Plant Pathogen Responses

Sam Amsbury Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, Sheffield, UK ORCiD: 0000-0002-2767-9768 s.amsbury@sheffield.ac.uk The physical and chemical barrier provided by the cell wall is one of the first lines of defence for plants against pathogen attack. Plant cell walls provide physical protection…

State Transition Regulation in Chlamydomonas

Ananya Mukherjee University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68588 ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1802-1806 amukherjee3@unl.edu Photosynthetic organisms often face fluctuations in light quality and quantity. Green plants and algae have built-in mechanisms that allow them to adapt to such changes. One…