Recent Posts

A role for melatonin in the defence of sweet oranges against citrus greening disease

If you regularly enjoy a cold glass of orange (Citrus × sinensis) juice, freshly squeezed or store-bought (who has time for the former, really?), then you should know that the future of this drink is at stake. Citrus greening disease or Huánglóngbìng (HLB) has been wreaking havoc on the citrus industry…

How a Mangrove tree can help to improve the salt tolerance of Arabidopsis and Rice

Affiliation: University of Melbourne ORCiD: 0000-0001-5092-6168 email: marc.somssich@unimelb.edu.au Mangrove trees live and thrive in intertidal zones, where they are regularly inundated with salt water. To survive such harsh environmental conditions, they have evolved several features to improve…

How to make an extraordinary machine: SMALL ORGAN 4 regulates ribosome biogenesis in plants

Ribosomes are essential molecular machines in the cell that translate mRNA sequences into proteins. Growing parts of an organism produce many ribosomes, so that after each cell division both daughter cells have enough to translate the proteins necessary for growth and development. Defects in ribosomes…

Expanded function of the P-type pentatricopeptide repeat protein ATP4 in RNA editing

Tianhu Sun ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2513-1387 Plant Breeding and Genetics Section, School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853 ts753@cornell.edu  Chloroplasts are semi-autonomous organelles that retain their own genomes derived from their cyanobacterial ancestors,…

The fat of the land: cuticle formation in terrestrial plants

Madeleine Seale Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3RB, United Kingdom Maddy.seale@plants.ox.ac.uk ORCID: 0000-0002-8924-3943   In a world surrounded by a vast expanse of gaseous air, water is constantly evaporating from aqueous sources…

Here, there and everywhere: Plastid- and nuclear-localized WHIRLY1 regulates salicylic acid homeostasis during developmental senescence

Does a new job always come with a new location? Perhaps this is true for some plant proteins; half of the proteins are located in more than one subcellular compartment. Emerging evidence in plants shows that nuclear-encoded proteins undergo redox and posttranslational modifications or processing events…

Novel Electrical Signaling: First Fast Voltage-Gated Sodium Channel Identified Outside of the Animal Kingdom

Stefanie Wege (University of Adelaide), Alexis De Angeli (Université de Montpellier) Electrical signals or action potentials are present in animals, plants, and other organisms such as single-celled diatoms (Moran et al., 2015; Hedrich et al., 2016; Helliwell et al., 2019). Electrical signals are…

Mutagenomics: The Future of Genetic Screens

Ananya Mukherjee ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1802-1806 University of Nebraska Lincoln Genetic screens are a remarkable way of identifying mutations affecting various aspects of plant growth and development. Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) (T)-DNA insertion lines enable rapid identification of mutant…

Leaf position makes a difference: the ABCB19 auxin transporter affects light perception

Author: David S. Favero1 (ORCID: 0000-0002-6879-0323) David.favero@riken.jp Affiliation: 1RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, Yokohama, Kanagawa, 230-0045 Japan  Main text: As autotrophs, plants must maintain photosynthesis to thrive. In order for this to happen, a plant’s…