Tag: Biotic Interactions

In response to biotic stresses, plants produce chemical defenses to reduce damage. Adaptations to insect infestation involve synthesis of Trp-derived metabolites, leading to metabolome alterations. Here, Dangol et al. analyzed the transcriptomic and metabolomic effects after herbivore feeding in Setaria…

“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 the American Society of Plant Physiologists (ASPP; later,…

Availability of nitrogen has always been a limiting factor for rice production. Different soil inhabitants and root-associated bacterial populations are involved in making nitrogen available to plants in organic as well as in inorganic forms. However, plant absorption of nitrogen is selective and affects…

CRISPR/Cas9 is a promising gene editing tool that has already been successfully used to modify many plant genes. In these applications, the gene editing machinery is transiently employed to make a stable genomic change which is then passed on to the progeny. A different application is to use CRISPR/Cas9…

Plants and insects aren't closely related, but they have a plethora of similar chemical weapons used for their interactions (defense, attraction, etc.). Beran et al. describe the function and biosynthesis of secondary metabolites that are shared in both insects and plants. The monoterpenes and…

Carnivorous plants are one of the easiest ways to demonstrate to children that “plants are cool too”. In their new review, Pavlovič and Mithöfer show that carnivorous plants can also be a gateway to introduce the subject of how plants defend themselves against herbivory, by drawing  links between…

This is a great review by Judelson and Ah-Fong on the diverse signals that occur between plants and their oomycete pathogens. The authors start by describing the life- and infectivity-cycles of disease-causing oomycetes, including the familiar plant pathogens, "aggressive" Pythium and "stealthy" Phytophthora.…

Insects provide a valuable service to the agricultural industry through pollination, which increases both the quality and harvest volume for many important food crops, however little is known regarding the role of insect functional trait differences in promoting crop pollination. Woodcock et al. tested…