Research Blog

The corn smut fungus Ustilago maydis that causes tumorous symptoms on all aerial parts of maize has established itself as a model system to dissect host colonization strategies by biotrophic fungi. Transcriptional responses upon U. maydis colonization were previously demonstrated by several studies using…

Piercing-sucking insects secrete saliva while feeding through specialized mouth parts called stylets. Saliva plays critical roles in insect digestion and nutrition, and regulates plant defense responses, but the specific metabolites involved have not been characterized. Shangguan et al. reported the…

Plant interactions with beneficial microbes are good strategies to survive biotic and abiotic challenging conditions, but the mechanisms that plants use to recruit these interactions, specially belowground, remain scarcely known. Schulz-Bohm et al. designed an olfactometer system to analyze the long…

The nucleus is a dynamic organelle whose positioning and movement is highly coordinated throughout plant development and differs between cell types. Upon the initiation and subsequent elongation of root hairs, the nucleus moves from a central position to the tip of the growing root hair. Nakamura et…

Ambitious plant synthetic biology projects are driving the evolution of advanced DNA assembly techniques that permit efficient and rapid assembly of multiple transcriptional units (TUs). Pollack et al. have incorporated features of individual techniques into a single “general purpose DNA assembly…

In order to use wild rice relatives for future crop improvement, the differences and similarities between wild and domesticated genomes need to be understood. Stein and colleagues sequenced the genomes of two domesticated varieties and seven wild species, unraveling 15 million years of evolutionary history…

Gene redundancy and/or developmental defects of higher order mutants make it hard to study the role of individual components of auxin signaling. Structural biology approach can provide a detour that circumvents endogenous auxin signaling. Removing of the phenyl moiety of F79 in the auxin receptor…

Genes that confer pathogen resistance have been recognized for a very long time, and the first of these R genes was cloned 25 years ago. Kourelis and van der Hoorn examine lessons from the more than 300 R genes whose gene products are known, and from this analysis identify nine different mechanisms for…