Category: Plant Science Research Weekly

FLS2 is a well-characterized cell-surface receptor that recognizes a short epitope found on most bacterial flagellin proteins. The plant pathogen Agrobacterium tumefaciens, causative agent of crown gall disease, deviates strongly at this epitope region, and so is generally not recognized by FLS2 receptors,…

We have only recently begun to appreciate the phenomenon of cross-species or cross-kingdom small RNA transfer, and its applications. Using examples from plants and animals, Cai et al. summarize how some pathogens have evolved the capacity to introduce small RNAs into their host to suppress host defense…

Nitrogen demands for plant growth are accomplished through fertilizers or biological nitrogen fixation. Industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer is expensive and causes pollution due to leaching of unused fertilizer. In this review, Bloch et al. discuss the current status of biological nitrogen fixation…

Organelles, such as the chloroplast and nucleus, are structures with specific functions within a plant cell. It has been reported that many related, or homologous, proteins function in different organelles. However, how and why organellar proteins have diverged over evolutionary time remains unclear.…

Orphan genes are those that are found in only a single species. In trying to understand the origin of orphan genes, O’Conner and Li have found that many of these orphan genes are likely to have originated as mitochondrial genes, as many are nuclear genes whose encoded proteins are targeted to the mitochondria…

The transition of plants from water to land is one of the most momentous shifts in the history of life on Earth. 500 million years ago, the first land plants dramatically changed the environments on the planet, creating soils, rivers and the oxygen-rich atmosphere. However, the factors that enabled early…

How do cells know when it is time to divide? Helt et al. explore this question using the single-celled alga Chlamydomonas. Unlike most animal and fungal cells, which tend to maintain a relatively consistent size by dividing after their size has doubled, Chlamydomonas cells can undergo several rounds…

Sometime around 1.8 to 2 billion years ago, complex eukaryotic cells appeared for the first time, providing the ancestor for plants, animals and fungi. Many lines of evidence have indicated that this event probably involved an ancient archaeon taking up an ancient bacterium, the progenitor of all mitochondria.…