Recent Posts

A novel role for a phospholipase D in plant immunity

By Marcelo Lattarulo Campos marcelolattarulo@ufmt.br Integrative Plant Research Laboratory, Departamento de Botânica e Ecologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, Cuiabá/MT, Brazil. A fundamental tenet of any immune system is the ability to detect the presence…

MtSSPdb—a new data base for the small secreted peptide research community

Eva Hellmann, The Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge, CB2 1LR Cambridge, United Kingdom, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4591-2973 eva.hellmann@slcu.cam.ac.uk   Small secreted peptides (SSPs) are short peptides that function as messengers and regulate a variety of processes in plants…

Improving crop water-use efficiency requires optimizing the circadian clock

Meisha Holloway-Phillips Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland m.holloway-phillips@unibas.ch The slogan, ‘more crop per drop’, which was popularised in the early 2000s, depicts the need to improve the productivity of crops for the same water inputs (Kijne…

Location, location, location: phototropin 2 action at the chloroplast membrane

As someone with a background in plant molecular genetics, I confess to occasionally forgetting about location. Reverse genetics is a powerful tool for picking apart gene networks, but in which organ do these genes act? Which tissue of that organ? Which cells of that tissue and which compartment of those…

NIT proteins regulate rice root plasticity in response to nitrate and ammonium

Lena Maria Müller Boyce Thompson Institute, Ithaca, NY, USA Nitrogen (N) is a critical element in plant nutrition and an important building block of amino acids, nucleic acids, and secondary metabolites. Roots take up N mainly in the form of nitrate (NO3-) and ammonium (NH4+). To feed a growing…

From fuzz to fiber – identification of genes involved in cotton fiber elongation

Kim L Johnson La Trobe Institute for Agriculture & Food, Department of Animal, Plant and Soil Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3086, Australia Email: k.johnson@latrobe.edu.au At least some of the clothing you are wearing is likely made of cotton, and you are not alone. Cotton…

CBL2-CIPK6-TST2-mediated regulation of sugar homeostasis

Sugars have a key role in numerous cellular processes, and thus their storage and distribution are tightly controlled to ensure appropriate access when needed. In plants, the vacuole is the major storage organelle. The tonoplast (vacuole membrane) contains various transporters that regulate sugar and…

AT the Onset of DNA Replication in Arabidopsis

Author Anne-Sophie Fiorucci Affiliation Centre for Integrative Genomics, Faculty of Biology and Medicine, Génopode Building, University of Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. ORCID number 0000-0002-3254-5967 DNA replication allows doubling of the genomic content of a cell before…

Phosphoregulation within the photorespiratory cycle: regulate smarter - adapt better?

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 To cope with various abiotic and biotic stress factors, plants must be facile in adapting cellular…