Recent Posts

Review: The Plant Microbiota: Systems-Level Insights and Perspectives ($)

Terrestrial plants are hosts to diverse types of microbes, predominantly bacteria, that affect plant health and growth in numerous ways. The major types of plant microbiota include plant pathogens, arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, endophytes (residing within plant tissues), epiphytes (residing on plant…

Best of 2016: Top Topics in The Plant Cell journal

We’ve highlighted some of the Plant Cell papers that were widely shared, liked, blogged, retweeted and otherwise garnered high-levels of attention this year. Perhaps you can use some holiday-season quiet time to catch up on those you missed. Reviews and Perspectives Creating order from chaos: epigenome…

Review: Endosperm and Imprinting

"The endosperm is often viewed as a complicated and rather strange tissue" begins this review by Gehring and Satyaki. They go on to describe that the endosperm is the site of expression of imprinted genes, which are genes that are expressed soley when inherited from the mother or father.  The authors…

GARNet2016 CRISPR/Cas workshop presentation

Slides from the recent CRISPR/Cas workshop held at the GARNet2016 meeting are now available to download. Organized by Vladimir Nekrasov and Amanda Hopes (The Sainsbury Laboratory/University of East Anglia, UK), the workshop title was, "Introduction to CRISPR-Cas, troubleshooting target design…

Two-cell metabolism in multicellular cyanobacteria ($)

Nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria such as Anabaena sp. PCC 7120 have the challenge of supporting nitrogenase, an enzyme that is highly sensitive to oxygen, and simultaneously photosynthesis, an oxygen-producing set of reactions. They accomplish this by segregating these reactions into two cells, heterocysts…

RNA Degradome Studies Give Insights into Ribosome Dynamics

IN BRIEF by Gregory Bertoni gbertoni@aspb.org RNA metabolism is key to a number of crucial processes in the cell, including transcription, RNA splicing, translation, and gene regulation. For efficient translation, mature mRNAs must have a 7-methylguanosine cap on the 5′ end to help recruit the translation…

Ticket to Ride: tRNA-Related Sequences and Systemic Movement of mRNAs

IN BRIEF by Jennifer Mach jmach@aspb.org Movement of macromolecules through the plant phloem provides a mechanism for long-distance signaling that plants use in development, disease resistance, and other adaptive responses (reviewed in Spiegelman et al., 2013). For example, full-length RNAs, such…