Plants. When we read this word, what comes to mind might be a rose, a tomato plant, or an oak tree. But plants belong to a green lineage that is far more diverse than what we encounter in daily life. This lineage also includes unicellular green algae. The evolution of the green lineage spans over a billion…

During meiosis, the cell division process that generates four distinct gametes, chromosomes exchange genetic material during homologous recombination. Homologous recombination is a complex process that is tightly controlled in location and frequency – each chromosome must have at least one crossover…

Protein domains lacking a rigid structure, known as Intrinsically Disordered Regions (IDRs), play important roles in many cellular processes, including protein quality control, protein-protein interactions, and subcellular localization. However, we know little about how the properties of IDRs are linked…

Large, A-type starch granules are desirable for nutritional and industrial purposes due to their gelatinization properties. However, the average wheat starch granule is small (less than 30 µm) compared to other starchy crops like pea and potato. Natural wheat cultivars with large granules have not been…

The Arabidopsis thaliana Columbia-0 (Col-0) accession is often treated as a standard reference genotype shared by plant researchers worldwide. However, a new study by Tadros et al. shows that decades of independent propagation in different laboratories have left distinct genetic and epigenetic signatures…

Green leaves are essential for photosynthesis and crop productivity, but the genes that maintain normal leaf development can also influence other aspects of plant growth. In this study, Wang et al. investigated a rice mutant called yellow-green leaf and reduced tillering (ygrt), which develops yellow-green…

For successful fertilization, sperm must reach the egg. Most land plants deliver non-motile sperm through a pollen tube. However, the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha retains the ancestral form of fertilization, sperm that are motile and use flagella to swim towards the egg. This process offers a unique…

Root nodules are specialized organs that house nitrogen-fixing rhizobia bacteria. Previously, bulk tissue transcriptomics suggested that root nodules and lateral roots share most transcriptional programs and therefore may share overlapping developmental trajectory. Contrary to this model, recent work…