Recent Posts

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…

Plant Science Research Weekly: March 13

Opinion: We aren’t good at picking candidate genes, and it’s slowing us down Recent advances have facilitated the generation of huge phenotypic datasets from plant populations. However, the means to inexpensively organise such datasets to unequivocally determine causal genes has evaded researchers.…

Plant Science Research Weekly: March 7

Review: How mycorrhizal associations drive plant population and community biology ($) Great strides have been made in discovering the molecular players that allow plants and mycorrhizal fungi to establish their symbiosis. Here, Tedersoo et al. look beyond the single plant and address how these associations…

Plant Science Research Weekly: February 28

Review: Crop phenomics and high-throughput phenotyping Crop phenomics has lagged behind crop genomics because traditional methods are time-consuming, expensive, invasive and subjective. Recently, high-throughput, automated, sensor and machine-vision methods have been developed, as reviewed by Yang…

Plant Science Research Weekly: February 21

Review: In vitro analytical approaches to study plant ligand-receptor interactions It seems every other paper shows a nice diagram of a signaling cascade that includes a receptor interacting with its ligand. However, sometimes these diagrams are little more than speculation or guesswork. It’s not…

Plant Science Research Weekly: February 14

Review: Deep learning for plant genomics and crop improvement One of the goals of plant science is to use the molecular phenotype (genome, transcriptome, proteome) to predict the whole-plant phenotype. Deep learning approaches can potentially begin to do this, starting with a training dataset, and…

Plant Science Research Weekly: February 7

Review. Gossypium genomics: Trends, scope, and utilization for cotton improvement Cotton (Gossypium spp.) provides the world’s most important natural fiber, and I suspect with our growing realization of the problems with plastics there will be still more demand for it. Yang et al. review the current…

Plant Science Research Weekly: January 31

Review: Characteristics, drivers and feedbacks of global greening Whenever we talk about global trends there are of course local variations. Here, Piao et al. discuss recent trends of global greening, which is occurring at arctic as well as temperate and tropical regions. Overall, this greening is…