Review: Beautiful mutations This is an interesting and engaging review article, written by a team from Bayer US Crop Science, on how mutations (broadly defined) have benefited plant domestication and breeding. While it briefly covers the basics, such as population genetics, it really focuses on demystifying…

Review: How to evaluate the climate-mitigation potential of plant agricultural interventions Agriculture contributes substantially to climate change. Many agricultural interventions have been suggested as opportunities to lower this impact, through CO2 sequestration or through reducing emissions of…

Running on empty: How does the absence of mtDNA shape mitochondrial movement and connectivity? Mitochondria move within cells to support bioenergetic function and enable sharing of content, including mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Since not all plant mitochondria carry a full set of, or any mtDNA, sharing…

Review: Harnessing the power of gene regulatory networks for crop improvement The number of large molecular plant datasets seems to be growing exponentially. With this growth comes an urgent need for researchers to understand how these datasets should be analyzed and integrated to get accurate understandings…

Special Science Issue: Plants and Heat The June 12 issue of Science has a focus on plants and heat that includes several excellent review and research articles. In a very interesting review, Singh Yadav et al. discuss the complex and fascinating question of how plants sense temperature, emphasizing…

Review: Gene discovery, from Arabidopsis to crops This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first genome sequence of a plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, (see https://doi.org/10.1038/35048692). As this review by Bevan et al. observes, this exciting accomplishment was met with some skepticism…

Review: Lost in translation – lessons from concepts that don’t translate from Arabidopsis The May 2025 issue of The Plant Cell has a focus on Arabidopsis and how this simple model plant has had an outsized impact on our understanding of pretty much everything botanical (and beyond). Alongside…

Forum. Plant surveillance: The emerging role of substrate-binding proteins Plants are sessile organisms and, unlike animals, cannot escape adverse environmental conditions. To cope with this limitation, they have evolved a complex surveillance system to detect and respond to fluctuating conditions…