Plants and other photoautotrophs have potential to support astronaut needs, including food production, atmospheric and water recycling, and the generation of pharmaceuticals and biofuels. A recent review by Murphy et al. provides a brief historical overview of microalgae and cyanobacteria research in…

The awesome power of metagenomics is providing fascinating insights into the origins of life. Tracing backwards from today’s life forms we can identify features that were likely present in the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), as well as the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA), which arose…

Biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) are groups of genes physically located in close proximity in a genomic region and can be thought of as a close-knit genomic orchestra. While these BGCs were thought to be rare in plants, unlike bacteria, Peng et al. takes the story a step ahead with the discovery of…

Genetic studies in Arabidopsis have identified a lot of the participants in signal transduction pathways, but often its less clear precisely where they function. As an example, although it is well known that H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) production by RBOHs in the apoplast triggers many downstream cellular…

Clearly, the mechanical properties of plant cell walls have important implications for growth and development, but they are not necessarily easy to measure, especially in intact, living tissues. Here, Alonso-Baez et al. used Brillouin microscopy and molecular rotors to characterize cell wall properties…

Nitrogen is a key nutrient for plant development, and plant nutrient acquisition is highly influenced by the rhizosphere microbiome. However, how host genomic variation and root transcriptional regulation shape microbiome assembly under field conditions remains unclear. Li and colleagues addressed this…

Self-pollination in many crop cultivars has been extremely useful for humans. It simplifies propagation, stabilizes traits, and supports reliable fruit production. But for many plant species, selfing comes with biological costs: reduced genetic diversity, inbreeding depression, and potential declines…

A natural antisense transcript (NAT) is a form of non-coding RNA that shares sequence complementarity with a protein coding sense gene. Although originally thought to be transcriptional noise, recent findings show that NATs contain functional roles, often through the regulation of their cognate sense…