Category: Plant Science Research Weekly

Visual and other cues attract pollinators. Bees vision is skewed towards blue colors, but they also visit non-blue flowers. Moyroud et al. looked at how petal surface textures affect bee responses. The authors observed that similar parallel cuticular striations in diverse angiosperm lineages show convergent…

One of the great questions of biology is how and why C4 photosynthesis pathway evolved independently more than 60 times. The advantages are obvious (increased productivity), but the underlying molecular predisposition to this transition remains poorly defined. Using a comparative transcriptomics approach…

Peroxisomes are endoplasmic reticulum-derived membrane-enclosed organelles in which many oxidative enzymatic reactions are compartmentalized. These reactions and their products contribute to energy production, detoxification, and signaling. Kao et al. review our understanding of the plant peroxisome,…

Because of their important roles in attracting pollinators, the secondary or specialized metabolites of flowers (color, fragrance) get a lot of attention. Borghi and Fernie argue that flower function is equally dependent on primary (central) metabolites, which not only provide the precursors for secondary…

The liverwort Marchantia polymorpha is a fascinating plant for many reasons, including the fact that it is one of the earliest terrestrial species that split off from the rest of the land plants. Therefore, comparisons between Marchantia and green algae or Marchantia and the rest of the land plants tell…

Plasmodesmata (PD) are complex, regulated channels between plant cells that facilitate the movement of signals, metabolites and pathogens, but their small size makes them difficult to study. Previously, Kraner et al. identified an Arabidopsis mutant that produced fewer, simpler plasmodesmata. In their…

Pectin is a polymer that holds cell walls together and stiffens the walls, but what happens when those cell walls need to move, for example when cells (including guard cells) expand? Rui et al. started with a guard-cell specific transcriptome to identify genes encoding cell-wall modifying enzymes. They…

Through insertional mutagenesis of rice, Cheng et al. identified a BTBN (Brac/Tramtrack/Broad complex and NPH3 domain)-encoding gene which they named WINDING 1 (WIN1), because the mutant phenotype (caused by ectopic expression in the shoot) causes the shoot to grow in a spiral. Ectopic expression of…