Guest editor: Magdalena Julkowska  Magdalena 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 root-to-shoot ratio in Arabidopsis, (2) study the expression patterns in plants…

Focused Review: A role for ecophysiology in the ’omics’ era Ecophysiology is the study of plant functioning as modulated by the environment (or, as described by one author, "outdoors physiology"). Flexas and Gago ask whether research (and training) in  ecophysiology has been left behind somewhat…

Special Issue: Long-distance signaling ($) Of course plants need to communicate between their different parts, and our understanding of these crucial signals has been advancing rapidly. This issue of Plant Cell Physiology includes a set of papers highlighting recent findings. A meeting report by…

Review: Harnessing synthetic chemistry to probe and hijack auxin signaling Auxin has been studied since Charles Darwin observed the phototropic response. More recently, chemical genetic approaches using auxin agonists and antagonists have been applied to studies of auxin. Torii et al. review how…

This week's edition is guest edited by Arif Ashraf, a PhD student at Iwate University, Japan and Graduate Student Ambassador of ASPB. His research interest is understanding the hormonal interplay in primary root development of Arabidopsis thaliana. He blogs about plant science (http://www.aribidopsis.com/).…

Review: X-ray fluorescence microscopy imaging Kopittke et al. review the use of synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence microscopy as a tool to quantify and localize diverse elements in plants. The authors describe how this method can be used to study nutrients in plants and human foods, as well as metal…

Perspective: The multiplanetary future of plant synthetic biology The exploration of space is one of the most inspiring areas of scientific research and a major driver of technological innovation. One of the major factors limiting human expansion trough space is the immensely high cost of resupplying…