Tag: Genomics

Quenopodiium quinoa is a highly nutritive and facultative halophyte pseudocereal whose cultivation has increased 10 fold in the last decades. However, the adaption to non-native areas is not easy to achieve and the limited genetic resources do not allow a breeding program. Zou and collaborators have…

The liverwort Marchantia polymorpha is a fascinating plant for many reasons, including the fact that it is one of the earliest terrestrial species that split off from the rest of the land plants. Therefore, comparisons between Marchantia and green algae or Marchantia and the rest of the land plants tell…

Seeds integrate environmental information and trigger molecular pathways that help with the decision making process of whether to germinate or not. Several studies in numerous species have shown details of global transcriptomic changes during germination. However, Narsai et al. dig a little deeper. By…

A hot topic in plant evolutionary biology is whole genome duplications (WGDs), in which an organism copies its entire genetic dataset. Having double the required DNA is often viewed as detrimental but can be useful in times of rapid environmental change. Recently, the role of WGDs during plant evolution…

Hirooka et al. examined the genome of an acid-loving green alga, Chlamydomonas eustigma, to learn how it tolerates its low pH environment. Key differences between the acidophilic species and the neutrophilic species Chlamydomonas reinhardtii include: an increase in expression of genes encoding plasma…

Perception of the phytohormone ethylene results in the cleavage of EIN2 and translocation to the nucleus of its C-terminal end, EIN2-C. Zhang et al. showed that EIN2-C is essential for chromatin modification that allows EIN3, the main ethylene signaling transcription factor, to transcriptionally regulate…

Paramutation is a natural epigenetic process that occurs in plants and animals that is associated with methylation-mediated gene silencing. The curious thing about a paramutated allele is than it can transfer its silenced state to its homologous and active allele. This freshly paramutated allele then…

This is an era of rapid acceleration of our ability to both read and write genomes. Chari and Church point to a future in which making a small number of changes in a genome (editing) is supplanted by making hundreds or thousands or more of changes, essentially whole-genome editing. Basically, the authors…