Category: The Plant Cell: In Brief

Crosstalk, crosstalk— it’s a word that keeps coming up. Indeed, and perhaps not surprisingly, plant hormone signaling pathways all seem to affect each other to some extent. For example, the MYC2 transcription factor plays roles in abscisic acid (ABA) and jasmonic acid (JA) signaling in the response…

Cell division is essential for growth and reproduction. The cell cycle machinery is well conserved between yeast and animals, but whether this conservation extends to the plant lineage is not clear, having diverged over two billion years ago: ample time and opportunity for divergence in sequence and…

By Peter Ulvskov and Jesper Harholt For the first time in a very long time, a new polysaccharide is reported in plants. Roberts et al. (2018) discovered an arabinoglucan in the moss Physcomitrella patens. This discovery came about not as a result of biochemical characterization of the moss cell…

From the human perspective, separate sexes are the norm while hermaphroditism is an exotic concept. For plants, hermaphroditism is the norm. Dioecy, separate male and female individuals, is rare and dispersed in the angiosperm phylogeny (Käfer et al 2017, Renner 2014). In fact, dioecy is rare enough…

Although they lack eyes, plants can differentiate between colors with a full complement of photoreceptors. Phytochromes (phys) are such photoreceptors dedicated to the visible light spectrum ranging from red light (600-700 nm) to far-red light (700-750 nm). phys are some of the most studied genes and…

When plants have plenty of room, they can maximize the incoming light by spreading their leaves. However, in modern agricultural fields, plants that hold their leaves upright to decrease mutual shading can be grown at high density. Leaves serve as a reservoir for nitrogen that can be re-mobilized to…

Fungal pathogens such as Botrytis cinerea can cause devastating losses to agricultural crops – ask any strawberry, grape, or tomato grower. To prevent these losses, plants can summon a variety of immune responses by recognizing specific molecules associated with pathogen attack and/or internal damage.…

Eukaryotic genes contain protein-coding exons interspersed with non-coding introns. While introns are usually spliced out of mRNA (often in conjunction with various exons), intron retention usually causes mRNA to remain in the nucleus instead of being exported to the cytoplasm for translation. This process…