A weekly plant science research roundup curated and summarized by our Plantae Editors and Fellows
The first known report of an Arabidopsis thaliana mutant appeared approximately 150 years ago (1873). In the intervening years, Arabidopsis has become an essential model for plant genetic research, driving…
The expression of a transgene in plants can impose a significant stress, sometimes referred to as metabolic burden. Synthetic gene circuits offer a precise approach to engineering plant traits by regulating…
Cells are as small as life gets, but can be much larger than they appear if given room for expansion. This is possible with expansion microscopy, a technique that enables three dimensional cell imaging…
How can we precisely image plant tissues in super-resolution when approaching the optical limits of conventional microscopes? One solution lies in expansion microscopy, a technique that embeds tissue samples…
With climate change, drought is expected to happen more frequently, making supplemental irrigation increasingly necessary to sustain crop productivity. One target trait to improve climate resilience is…
Light is a powerful signal, shaping plant development and growth. However, the cellular mechanisms that translate light signals into precise developmental responses are still being unravelled. The Arabidopsis…
Brassinosteroids are plant hormones that play important roles in cell proliferation and expansion, but it is still unclear exactly what those roles are. Vukasinovic and colleagues show, in Arabidopsis…
In flowering plants, reproduction involves the alternation of two generations: the diploid sporophyte and the haploid gametophyte. Traditionally, the male gametophyte was thought to develop autonomously…
FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) and TERMINAL FLOWER1 (TFL1), two members of the phosphatidylethanolamine-binding protein (PEBP) family, are well-known regulators of flowering time and inflorescence architecture…
Phytohormones such salicylic acid (SA), ethylene (ET), and jasmonic acid (JA) are known to regulate plant immunity, but their spatial dynamics has remained unclear. Using a set of fluorescent reporters…
This exciting paper by Chen, Qi, Zou et al. adds a new twist to the story of auxin. Until this work, the current model for how auxin mediates transcriptional changes has been that auxin (IAA) binds to…
A pan-genome has been assembled for the Solanum genus, which contains many diverse and economically important crops including potato, tomato, and African eggplant. Genomes were assembled for 22 species,…
Each week, the Plantae editors select new plant science research articles to highlight. The short summaries describe the question addressed and key findings, with links to the article.
