Category: The Plant Cell: In Brief

IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach jmach@aspb.org Green may have been the Pantone Color of the Year for 2013 (http://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2013), but 2016 was a great year for papers on chlorophyll research, at The Plant Cell and beyond. In this year, we saw a pile of interesting papers examining…

IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart jlockhart@aspb.org Most plants are hermaphrodites, producing perfect flowers with both male and female functions. In roughly 6% of plants, however, male (usually XY) plants produce only male flowers and female (XX) plants produce only female flowers. These dioecious plants…

IN BRIEF by Kathleen L. Farquharson kfarquharson@aspb.org Alternative splicing (AS) regulates gene expression and greatly expands the coding capacity of complex genomes. By regulating which elements of an mRNA transcript are removed or retained, AS produces multiple transcripts from a single gene. Some…

IN BRIEF by Nancy R. Hofmann nhofmann@aspb.org A new study calls into question whether phytochrome B (phyB) must directly interact with phytochrome-interacting factors (PIFs) to promote light responses. Phytochrome photoreceptors mediate responses to red light in part by inducing the degradation of…

IN BRIEF by Gregory Bertoni gbertoni@aspb.org RNA metabolism is key to a number of crucial processes in the cell, including transcription, RNA splicing, translation, and gene regulation. For efficient translation, mature mRNAs must have a 7-methylguanosine cap on the 5′ end to help recruit the translation…

IN BRIEF by Nancy R. Hofmann  nhofmann@aspb.org Plant cell walls consist of cellulose microfibrils embedded in a matrix of polymers including hemicelluloses. As one of the main hemicelluloses in the cell walls of dicots, xyloglucan is an important target of study to understand plant cell walls…

IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach jmach@aspb.org Plants can dispose of organs such as leaves and recycle the nutrients in these organs into new leaves, seeds, or storage organs. However, when separated from its photosystem proteins, chlorophyll can be phototoxic, absorbing light and producing high-energy…

IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart jlockhart@aspb.org Heat and drought stress greatly restrict crop productivity, but most of what we know about a plant’s response to these stresses comes from controlled laboratory studies. This factor, along with the complex nature of these responses, has hampered efforts…