Tag: Evolution

Long overshadowed by protein-coding genes, the non-coding genome remains one of the most elusive frontiers in plant biology. Their sequence diversity and limited conservation have made functional annotation particularly challenging. Addressing this gap, Amundson and colleagues introduce “Conservatory”,…

The awesome power of metagenomics is providing fascinating insights into the origins of life. Tracing backwards from today’s life forms we can identify features that were likely present in the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), as well as the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA), which arose…

The colonization of land by plants was a crucial event in Earth’s history that fundamentally transformed our planet’s surface. Early plants were small and structurally simple, but terrestrial ecosystems also included other, non-plant organisms. Among the most striking were enigmatic organisms known…

Directed evolution aims to identify variants of a gene of interest (GOI) with improved or novel functions by accelerating mutation and selection under experimental conditions. However, in planta platforms have been hindered by slow plant cell division. Recently, Zhu et al. introduced the geminivirus…

Soybean is one of the most important cash crops for global food and feed, valued for its high-quality plant oil and protein. Centuries of domestication and breeding have narrowed its genetic diversity, leaving current cultivars vulnerable to climate change. To address this, Zhu and colleagues generated…

This is such an engaging and though-provoking review article. I’d love to ask a group of students to think about what makes a tree a tree, including such questions as: How do we define trees? Do woody plants share a single origin? How many angiosperms are woody? The answer to those questions and more…

I expect we’ve all been captivated by images of the beautiful spiral chloroplasts in the Spirogyra genus of filamentous algae, and who could forget that name? A new paper by Goldbecker et al. presents the genome of Spirogyra pratensis, uncovering not only some insights into this remarkable structure,…

If you’ve ever looked closely at a tomato flower, you might have noticed that its anthers cluster together in the center of the flower, making the pollen inaccessible to most insects. Tomato flowers are an example of a buzz pollinated flower, in which the pollen is released by the physical shaking…