Recent Posts

Ribosomes Meet Epigenetics

Chen et al. link chromatin modifying machinery with ribosome biogenesis. The Plant Cell (2018). https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.17.00626 by Xiangsong Chen and Xuehua Zhong Background: All cells need to make proteins to function properly. Ribosomes are the protein production factories consisting of…

Recruiter of Chromatin Regulators

Hohenstatt et al. describe a new recruiter of PcG chromatin regulators affecting flowering and meristem identity in Arabidopsis. https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.17.00117 By Pawel Mikulski 1) BACKGROUND: Polycomb group (PcG) proteins are key regulatory proteins involved in maintaining the ability (and…

Single Parent Expression (SPE) of non-syntenic genes in maize hybrids (Curr. Biol.) ($)

In maize, it has long been known that the crossing of two inbred lines can produce a hybrid offspring with higher yield than the parents. Baldauf and collaborators have studied the gene expression of 6 hybrid lines coming from 7 distantly related inbred lines. One line, B73, was chosen as the common…

Network-guided discovery of transcription factors epistasis in glucosinolate biosynthesis (Plant Cell)

Plant Cell.  Li et al. studied epistatic (non-additive) interactions amongst the network of transcription factors controlling aliphatic glucosinolate biosynthetic pathways, which are well-described and have diverse roles in plant defense. Specifically, the authors measured metabolite levels and transcript…

Ethylene Represses Gene Transcription via Histone Deacetylases

Approximately half of all ethylene-responsive genes are downregulated in the presence in ethylene (Chang et al, 2013), but this repression has received relatively little attention compared to the ethylene-mediated activation of expression. The known positive regulators of ethylene signaling include ETHYLENE…

An extracellular network of Arabidopsis leucine-rich repeat receptor kinases

Nature. Through the activity of hundreds of membrane receptors, plants can sense the extracellular environment and tune their growth and responses to abiotic and biotic stimuli in an elegant and complex way. Despite their pivotal role, only a dozen of receptors have been characterized in plants and very…

Chloroplasts Use Bacterial Mechanism to Recognize Start Codons

Scharff et al. investigate function of anti-Shine-Dalgarno sequence in chloroplast ribosomes https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.17.00524 By Lars B. Scharff BACKGROUND: Cells of plants contain three different systems for protein synthesis: in the cytosol, in plastids, and in mitochondria. Proteins in the…

Evolution of transposon-encoded anti-silencing factors in Arabidopsis ($)

Transposable elements (TEs) are a major component of eukaryotic genomes. Their activity is silenced by epigenetic mechanisms such as chromatin modifications and DNA methylation in order to avoid deleterious effects on host genome stability. Nevertheless, how TEs overcome silencing by the host and propagate…

Transcriptional Switching Makes New Messages

Fukudome et al. explore the significance of Pol II C-terminal phosphorylation https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.17.00331 By Akihito Fukudome and Hisashi Koiwa Background: In animals and plants, gene expression begins with an enzyme called RNA polymerase II (Pol II), which produces ribonucleic acid (RNA)…