Recent Posts

Review: Stem cells for crop improvement

Plants, like animals, have small populations of stem cells capable of differentiating into other tissues, but in plants these stem cell populations are even more long-lived and versatile. Stem cells in plants include the meristems (shoot and root apical meristems, inflorescence and axillary meristems)…

Tree or bush? It’s all in the hormones

Much of our understanding of the molecular underpinning that control shoot architecture comes from studies of annual plants such as Arabidopsis, pea, and rice. This new work by Su et al. investigates shoot branching in a long-lived tree, silver birch (Betula pendula). They started with a naturally occurring…

Splicing factor represses rice tillering by stabilizing strigolactone signal transmission

Liu et al. identify a monocot-specific splicing factor that elucidates a link between splicing and plant development through strigolactone signaling. By Tianzhen Liu, Qibin Lin National Key Facility for Crop Gene Resources and Genetic Improvement, Institute of Crop Sciences, Chinese Academy…