Recent Posts

Plant Science Research Weekly: May 15th

Review: Evo-physio: on stress responses and the earliest land plants Streptophytes are a grade of mostly freshwater algae that transitioned into land, a singularity that in turn gave rise to all present terrestrial flora. This passage along the hydrological gradient that culminated in land habitation…

Plant Science Research Weekly: May 8th

Tissue-resolved multi-omics atlas of Arabidopsis Arabidopsis as a model system has been intensively studied over the past twenty years, but the proteome of Arabidopsis has been less well characterized. Here, Mergner et al. report the first 30-tissue-type integrated proteome, phosphoproteome and transcriptome…

Plant Science Research Weekly: May 1st

Review: Evolution of virulence in rust fungi — multiple solutions to one problem Rust fungi are a diverse group (more than 7800 species) of phytopathogenic fungi that cause considerable economic loss. (Coincidently, I’m writing on Robigalia, the Roman “anti-rust” festival, which dates from…

Plant Science Research Weekly: April 24th

Reviews: The physiology of plant responses to drought, and forests and drought ($) The increasing global population causes an increasing need for food, but the changing climate means increasing drought occurrences. The April 17 2020 special issue of Science focusses on drought and its effects on…

Plant Science Research Weekly: April 17th

Review. Beyond natural: Synthetic expansions of botanical form and function “The goal of synthetic biology is to advance the ability to dependably and consistently design or reprogram living organisms and to fabricate products from biologically-derived materials.” In this review, Patron focuses…

Plant Science Research Weekly: April 10

White paper: Introducing plant biology graduate students to a culture of mental well‐being Graduate studies are challenging times, fraught with uncertainty and stress. Dewa et al. addressed this problem head on by developing a required, credited course for first-year graduate students, “Tools…

Plant Science Research Weekly: April 3rd

Editorial: Redeploying plant defences With COVID19 ravaging across the globe, the medicinal value of plants and related research fields e.g., phytochemistry, ethnobotany, etc., is presently in focus. The drug development chain, though extremely promising, is not an immediate solution as it is a long,…

Plant Science Research Weekly: March 27

Review. Signalling pathways underlying nitrogen-dependent changes in root system architecture: from model to crop species Nitrogen (N) is one of the seventeen essential nutrients for a plant to complete its life cycle and is one of the most important determinants of productivity of various crops globally.…

Plant Science Research Weekly: March 20

Update: How plants sense and respond to stressful environments A longstanding question in plant science is how plants “know” that they are under threat. The identification of cell-surface receptors that identify conserved pathogen patterns sheds some light on biotic stress perception, but what…