Recent Posts

Plant Science Research Weekly: June 28

Review: A series of fortunate events: Introducing Chlamydomonas as a reference organism Clamydomonas reinhardtii is the most thoroughly characterized unicellular alga. Like yeast, it is a single-celled eukaryotic organism that is easy to culture, and it lives predominantly in its haploid form but…

Plant Science Research Weekly: June 21st

Guest editor: Magdalena Julkowska Magda is a PostDoc at King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST, Saudi Arabia) working with Prof. Mark Tester. Her main interests are (1) salt-induced changes in the root-to-shoot ratio in Arabidopsis, (2) study the expression patterns in plants with…

Plant Science Research Weekly: June 14th

Review: N-degron pathway-mediated proteostasis in stress physiology The rate of most biological processes is ultimately determined by protein activity levels, which of course are determined by rate of degradation or inactivation as well as production. Dissmeyer reviews the Cys/Arg branch of…

Plant Science Research Weekly: June 7th

Review: Source–sink regulation in crops under water deficit ($) Plants have a remarkable ability to coordinate cellular activities across huge distances, yet we have only a basic understanding of how these remote activities are coordinated. A review by Rodrigues et al. summarizes what we know about…

Plant Science Research Weekly: May 31st

Review: Integration of sulfate assimilation with C and N metabolism in transition from C3 to C4 photosynthesis “Cysteine (HO2CCH(NH2)CH2SH) synthesis is the converging point of the three major pathways of primary metabolism: carbon, nitrate, and sulfate assimilation.” These metabolic connections…

Plant Science Research Weekly: May 24th

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Default activation and nuclear translocation of the plant cellular energy sensor SnRK1 ($) When I’m using my laptop without it being plugged in, at some point it enters battery saving mode as it senses that the battery charge is getting low. Organisms also sense their low energy reserves and activate…

Plant Science Research Weekly: May 17th

Reflections on Classics: Plant Cell's 30th anniversary "The 1980s were an exciting and revolutionary time for biology, and plant molecular biology in particular," begins an editorial by Bob Goldberg, Brian Larkins, and Ralph Quatrano, the three Founding Editors of The Plant Cell. They describe why…

Plant Science Research Weekly: May 10th

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Durum wheat genome highlights past domestication signatures and future improvement targets Durum wheat cultivar Svevo (Triticum turgidum L. ssp. durum) is a cereal crop predominantly grown for pasta production. It is the result of multiple rounds of domestication, originally deriving from wild emmer…

Plant Science Research Weekly: May 3rd

Review: Functional status of xylem through time ($) If you haven’t been paying attention, you may have missed the great advances that have been taking place in xylem research recently. This excellent review by Brodersen et al. is your chance to catch up. Like all aspects of plant science, new…