Current Biology has an excellent special issue on plant evolution full of  fascinating articles. As an example, a Primer by Zhuo Feng looks at how plants were catastrophically impacted by the end-Permian mass extinction event approximately 250 million years ago. The fossil record from the Cathaysian…

The ambient temperature for plant growth is increasingly unpredictable under the changing climate.  To ensure growth, the leaf is the immediate organ responding to maintain photosynthesis. In this review, Yang et al. point out stomatal development and dynamics as the adaptive responses to long-term…

When plants first moved onto land, they encountered challenges that aquatic ancestors never faced, including heat, dehydration, and rapidly changing environmental conditions. This review by Wang et al., explores how cytokinin signaling, a pathway best known for regulating plant growth and development,…

As close relatives of land plants, green algae provide insights into variations on photosynthesis. Many algae including Chlamydomonas reinhardtii have carbon-concentrating structures called pyrenoids that enrich CO2 around Rubisco, minimizing the competing oxygenation reaction. In a recent preprint,…

Plasma technology utilizes high-energy electrons to make nitrogen and oxygen gases from the atmosphere react with each other in order to produce various nitrogen oxide species. This technology can recreate the essential reactions underlying nitrogen fixation, through which nitrogen found in inert N2…

Many metabolic reactions take place in specialized compartments (e.g., plastids, peroxisomes), enhancing their efficiency by concentrating enzymes and substrates. Plastoglobules (PGs) are dynamic lipoprotein compartments that are found inside plastids anchored to the thylakoid membranes. A recent study…

Plants protect themselves from excess light by safely dissipating extra energy as heat through a process called non-photochemical quenching (NPQ). Several proteins are known to control this process, but the role of the antenna protein CP26 has remained unclear. In this study, Walter et al. used Arabidopsis…

Improving photosynthetic efficiency is an important strategy to boost yields in staple crops such as rice, which relies on the relatively inefficient C3 pathway. In contrast, C4 photosynthesis minimizes photorespiration through a carbon-concentrating mechanism, making it more productive under high-light…