Esculin, a Sucrose Proxy for Phloem Transport
Plant Physiology, Plant Physiology: On The InsideThe study of phloem transport and its vital roles in long distance communication and carbon allocation have been hampered by a lack of suitable tools that allow high-throughput, real-time studies. Since the 1970s, several studies have used 11C or 14C isotopes to measure rates of phloem transport in large…
An Improved Tool for Mapping the Membrane-Associated Protein Interactome
Blog, Plant Physiology, Plant Physiology: News and ViewsProtein-protein interactions mediate fundamental biological processes. Yeast two-hybrid assays can be used to detect protein-protein interactions in a fast and large-scale manner. However, in traditional yeast-two hybrid assays, the prey and bait proteins must be located in the nucleus to activate reporter…
Review: Harnessing synthetic chemistry to probe and hijack auxin signaling (New Phytol)
Plant Science Research WeeklyAuxin has been studied since Charles Darwin observed the phototropic response. More recently, chemical genetic approaches using auxin agonists and antagonists have been applied to studies of auxin. Torii et al. review how synthetic chemistry and chemical genetics have provided insights into and new tools…
Review: X-ray fluorescence microscopy imaging (Plant Physiol.)
Plant Science Research WeeklyKopittke et al. review the use of synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence microscopy as a tool to quantify and localize diverse elements in plants. The authors describe how this method can be used to study nutrients in plants and human foods, as well as metal hyperaccumulating plants, and toxic metal(oid)…
Carbon nanotubes deliver functional genetic material into mature plants without DNA integration
Plant Science Research WeeklyIntroducing DNA or RNA into plant cells remains a challenge. Demirer et al. describe a new method for transient expression studies through delivery of DNA or RNA via carbon nanotubes (CNTs); the size of the nanoparticles is smaller than the exclusion limit for plant cell walls. The authors show that…
Genome-scale sequence disruption following biolistic transformation in rice and maize (bioRxiv)
Plant Science Research WeeklyThe two classic approaches to introducing DNA into a plant’s genome are by harnessing Agrobacterium tumefaciens’ fascinating gene-transfer skill, or by shooting the new DNA into the cell using a “biolistic” (gun) approach. Because of Agrobacterium’s restricted choice of hosts, the biolistic…
A single cis-element that controls cell-type specific expression in Arabidopsis (bioRxiv)
Plant Science Research WeeklyMulticellular organisms have different tissues that carry out diverse and specialized functions, and tissue-specific expression is the feature that gives each tissue its specific protein content. Despite its importance, the mechanisms that control spatial patterning is poorly understood. In this work,…
Revealing the Invisible: A Synthetic Reporter for ABA
Blog, Plant Physiology, Plant Physiology: News and ViewsHow do you make the invisible visible? It’s a question that crops up again and again in molecular biology. Abscisic acid (ABA) is one of the most important hormones in plants and is essential for survival in suboptimal conditions. Despite this, we have only a basic understanding of where and when this…
A comprehensive toolkit for inducible, cell type-specific gene expression in Arabidopsis (Plant Physiol)
Plant Science Research WeeklyGene knock-outs and overexpression studies are useful indicators of gene function, but can obscure the gene’s distinct cell-type specific functions. Schürholz and Lopez-Salmeron et al. have developed a set of constructs that allow for precise expression of a gene-of-interest in subsets of cells, accompanied…