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…

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…

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,…

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.…

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…

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.…

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…

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…