Tag: Development

Morel et al. study the nectar-producing organs in flowers and identify major regulators of nectary size https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.18.00425 By Patrice Morel and Michiel Vandenbussche Background: Nectaries are the organs that produce nectar, a sugary substance that motivates pollinators such as…

Kretzschmar et al. study the proteome of lipid droplets and identify a protein that functions in protein degradation during germination https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.18.00276 Background:  Lipid droplets (LDs) are structures inside cells that store oil or fat, for example, in oil seeds. They were once…

Deruyffelaere et al. investigate lipid mobilization during seed germination. Plant Cell https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.18.00275 By Sabine D’ANDREA and Corine ENARD Background:  In cells, storage lipids are compartmentalized in specialized organelles called lipid droplets (LDs). The structure…

Lin et al. show that B-BOX DOMAIN PROTEIN28 plays a role in regulating plant development in response to light signals. Plant Cell https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.18.00226. By Dongqing Xu and Xing Wang Deng Background: Sunlight is one of the key environmental cues influencing plant growth and development.…

Auxin controls body plan patterning in land plants and it has been proposed to play a similar role in the development of brown algae (Phaeophyta) despite their distant evolutionary relationship with land plants. In flowering plants and many multicellular brown algae, the establishment of the apical-basal…

Plant cells have polarity, with the distribution of the auxin transporter protein PIN2 being a well-described example. Glanc et al. investigated how polarity is re-established following cell division. The authors showed that during cytokinesis, protein trafficking is directed towards the central cell…

Vegetative shade affects the ratio of red (R) and far-red (FR) light; relative to sunlight, the R/FR ratio is decreased due to absorbance of photosynthetically-active R light by other leaves. Low R/FR ratios cause increased elongation of shaded plant stems and petioles, as the plants strive to raise…

This paper is kind of fun because it explores plant leaf and petal shape from an engineering perspective, identifying “fundamental mechanistic insights into how nature invokes mechanics in the evolution of commonly found shapes in plant organs by differential growth.” For each organ, the authors…