Tag: Computational Biology

I really enjoyed this review article, which very successfully introduces the reader to the why and how of how to apply network science to plant science. Bassel never veers off into abstraction or “math-speak”, but instead roots his explanations in familiar biological or ordinary terms. As an example,…

Cyber-agriculture is a computer-controlled plant growing environment which regulates climatic conditions through machine learning, finding optimized variables (“recipes”) to maximize a specific plant trait. Here, Johnson et al. applied cyber-agriculture to chemotype optimization for flavor in basil…

Advances in sequencing technologies enable scientists to obtain molecular features of genes in high-dimensionality. Features of individual gene like expression, methylation, histone modification, evolutionary signals and sequence itself provide high resolution for distinguishing annotated genes. In plant…

Cells proliferate via symmetric divisions while asymmetric divisions are associated with new cell types, layers and developmental patterns. The correct orientation of cell divisions planes is required for plant tissue architecture and organ morphogenesis. In plants, previous attempts to predict division…

In plants, the final shape of organs depends on how and when the cells divide. To get some insights about the rules governing this process, Jackson et al. applied network science to study the cell organization dynamics in the shoot apical meristem (SAM). They studied the L1, L2 and L3 cell layers in…

Most plants depend on microbial partners (symbionts) to help them take up nutrients from the soil. Lu and Hedin set out to identify how these plant-symbiont partnerships contribute to plant distributions and biogeochemical cycles, using an evolution-based modelling approach. The model takes into account…

Genomics and transcriptomics have brought huge advances in understanding of plant science, but proteomics is both more challenging and in some ways more relevant to understand what is happening inside of a cell. Proteins function largely through their interactions with other proteins, so it is important…

Phenotypic plasticity, or the ability to change in response to the environment, is one of the most characteristic (and to me, endearing) qualities of plants. As Arnold et al. observe, it is also one of the most important in terms of future climate change; phenotypic plasticity will mean the difference…