Tag: Evolution

The relationship between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi has persisted for 400 million years, but we are still learning about the biochemistry of this interaction. MacLean, Bravo and Harrison review how plants attract, recognize, and accommodate their fungal partners, from pre-contact through…

In land plant genomes, transposable elements (TEs) are ubiquitously methylated in CG and non-CG sequence contexts. Apart from methylation of TEs, DNA methylation also occurs on bodies of actively transcribed genes, typically in the CG context, with very low or no non-CG methylation, and is referred to…

DNA sequencing was slow before the development of high throughput sequencing. Portable DNA sequencing, which would make sequencing on-site a reality, was impossible until recently. Parker et al. report on the on-site use of MinION from Oxford Nanopore Technologies for DNA barcoding, which yields data…

Many plants are not simple diploids (two copies of each chromosome) but are instead are the result of various forms of polyploidization (for example, whole-genome duplication or interspecific hybridization). Polyploidization can disrupt well-established controls over gene expression levels, transposon…

Mu et al. mapped a QTL previously shown to control fruit weight in tomato, and named the responsible gene Cell Size Regulator (CSR). They found that CSR-D, the derived allele, increases cell size and is widespread in Solanum lycopersicum var. lycopersicum, but not in ancestral tomatoes with smaller fruit.…

Cultivated apples (Malus domestica) trace their roots to Kazakhstan 4000 – 10,000 years ago, and since then have been propagated, transported, hybridized to other Malus species, and domesticated. Duan et al. sequenced more than 100 diverse accessions to trace apple's history and identify loci subjected…

Plants, green algae and cyanobacteria carry out oxygenic photosynthesis through the coordination of two photosystems, PSI and PSII. Many other photosynthetic prokaryotes use a single reaction center to carry out anoxygenic photosynthesis. Gisriel et al. describe the structure of a photosynthetic reaction…

Maize (corn), an important staple of the diet in ancient and modern times, was cultivated at higher altitudes in the southwestern United States, around 2,000 years after its introduction to the lowland US regions. In order to better understand how maize later adapted to high altitudes, authors sequenced…