Tag: Biotic Interactions

Pseudonectaries do not secrete nectar like nectaries. So, what are their ecological functions? Are there any morphological and anatomical differences between them and true nectaries? How do they develop and evolve? Liao et al. examined pseudonectaries of Nigella damascene to answer these questions. The…

The large apoplastic intercellular space of plant leaves creates nutrient-rich niches for microbial colonization. To date, whether and how plants control the composition of leaf microbiota is poorly understood. Chen et al. reported that the Arabidopsis quadruple mutant (min7fls2efrcerk1 or mfec)…

Cuscuta (dodders) are parasites that survive on other host plants.Liu et al. found more than 1500 proteins are transferred between Cucuta and host plants forming a sort of interplant chemical communication. Furthermore, proteins could move between two hosts that are connected by dodder bridges, and retain…

Plants took hundreds of million years to evolve from aquatic to land environments. Biotic and abiotic stress adaptation contributed to the transition. In this preprint, Romani et al. elucidated functions of the transcription factor CLASS I HOMEODOMAIN LEUCINE-ZIPPER (C1HDZ) in the early land plant Marchantia…

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 affect plant communities. Notably, they review the functions of the four evolutionarily…

The questions of how patterns are formed is one of the oldest in biology, and even considered by the famous mathematician Alan Turing, who proposed that reaction-diffusion (RD) models underly de novo pattern formation. Briefly, a reaction that takes place in one place sends a signal that leads to a different…

Hybrid necrosis occurs when the progeny of a cross between two different plants show widespread cell death. It can be caused by autoactivation of nucleotide-binding and leucine rich repeat domain (NLR) proteins, intracellular immune receptors that play a central role in plant resistance to diverse pathogens.…

In plants, disease resistance genes typically act in a dominant way – the presence of a resistance allele, even a single copy, is enough to confer resistance. The barley gene Mildew Resistance Locus O (MLO1) is different, as it acts in a recessive way; loss-of-function mlo1 plants are resistant to…