Commentary: Fund food research now Recently, a team of agricultural economists (Pardey et al.) released a powerful commentary about the state of agricultural research funding, which they say is insufficient. They observe that, fueled in part by the changing climate, food prices are rising everywhere,…

Review: A complete guide to metabolomics This review by Rai et al., part of a focus collection on metabolism, comprehensively covers the role of metabolomics in plant biology: its history, its tools and techniques, and its impact. As the authors point out, metabolomics bridge the gap between genotype…

Review.When the sun becomes too hot: Non-photochemical quenching in plants Plant photosynthetic machinery can easily be overwhelmed by strong sunlight. Therefore, plants developed a set of processes called Non-Photochemical Quenching, a safety valve that dissipates excess light energy as heat. In…

Opinion: Genomic studies hint at what makes a tree a tree This is such an engaging and though-provoking review article. I’d love to ask a group of students to think about what makes a tree a tree, including such questions as: How do we define trees? Do woody plants share a single origin? How many…

Review: Beautiful mutations This is an interesting and engaging review article, written by a team from Bayer US Crop Science, on how mutations (broadly defined) have benefited plant domestication and breeding. While it briefly covers the basics, such as population genetics, it really focuses on demystifying…

Review: How to evaluate the climate-mitigation potential of plant agricultural interventions Agriculture contributes substantially to climate change. Many agricultural interventions have been suggested as opportunities to lower this impact, through CO2 sequestration or through reducing emissions of…

Running on empty: How does the absence of mtDNA shape mitochondrial movement and connectivity? Mitochondria move within cells to support bioenergetic function and enable sharing of content, including mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Since not all plant mitochondria carry a full set of, or any mtDNA, sharing…

Review: Harnessing the power of gene regulatory networks for crop improvement The number of large molecular plant datasets seems to be growing exponentially. With this growth comes an urgent need for researchers to understand how these datasets should be analyzed and integrated to get accurate understandings…