Tag: Epigenetics

Bradamante et al. investigate the heterogeneity of stem cells of the shoot apical meristem https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad295 By Vu Nguyen, Gabriele Bradamante, Ortrun Mittelsten Scheid and Ruben Gutzat Background: In plants, stem cells in the shoot apical meristem (SAM) produce new organs…

Epigenetic stress memory in gymnosperms is the topic of a new review by Fossdal et al. Gymnosperms are long-lived, cone-bearing, tough trees, known to tolerate episodic stress. Their adaptive traits to stress are not passed on in a straightforward way, conforming to classical Mendelian inheritance. Instead,…

Kornienko  et al. discover that Arabidopsis genome is full of long-non-coding RNAs that show their expression only in specific tissues and plants from different geographic origins because of differences in epigenetic silencing of these genes. Plant Cell - https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad233 By Aleksandra…

Pelayo et al. explore the function of a biological timer that activates key genes for flowering. Margaret Anne Pelayo, Nara Institute of Science and Technology https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad123 Background: For flowers to form, the floral meristem (floral stem cells) must irreversibly commit…

Increasing plant resistance to specific pathogens through genome editing is a very active branch of crop engineering. In a recent paper, Veley et al. propose to edit the epigenome to boost resistance to cassava bacterial blight by increasing the levels of DNA methylation at specific sites, while leaving…

Chromatin remodellers are highly conserved eukaryotic proteins with regulatory roles in various aspects of DNA metabolism including DNA repair, gene expression and mitosis. Here, Kang et al. examine the function of the CHROMATIN REMODELLING19 (CHR19) in Arabidopsis thaliana. Using two T-DNA insertion…

Dr. Thelma Madzima (she/her) is one of very few Black faculty in the USA who are plant molecular biologists. Originally from Zimbabwe, Thelma immigrated to the US at the age of 17 to attend college. She received her B.S. in Plant Science and Plant Biotechnology from Fort Valley State University, a historically…

Transgenerational memory can occur through epigenetic regulation of gene expression (for example through DNA methylation) when plants have been exposed to abiotic stresses. Transferring a specific biochemical adaption to the next generation of plants can help the plant counter stress. Here Xu et al.…