Recent Posts

Live-Cell Imaging of Mobile RNAs in Plants

One of the most exciting findings in the past few decades is the discovery that individual mRNAs and noncoding RNAs can act as long-distance signaling messengers traveling cell to cell to distant sites in the plant. Numerous examples unveiled the involvement of endogenous RNAs as non-cell-autonomous…

New Insights into the Molecular Biology of Plant Circadian Rhythms

The circadian clock is an endogenous timekeeper that synchronizes essential biological processes with the outside world. Eukaryotic clocks rely on the ubiquitin proteasome system to target core clock factors for degradation. Altering clock protein degradation can change the period length of the clock.…

RecQ Proteins: Masters of Genome Surveillance

Wiedemann et al. show that RecQ6 in Physcomitrella enhances homologous recombination and gene targeting https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.17.00632.  Background: All living cells have mechanisms to protect their DNA against breaks during duplication and against damage by UV-light or chemicals. RecQ helicases…

Multiple Phytohormone Screening Method

Phytohormones are naturally occurring signaling molecules that play key roles in the regulation of plant physiology, development, and adaptation to environmental stimuli. Generally, their concentrations in plant tissues are extremely low (fmol-pmol/g fresh weight, FW). Although certain phytohormones…

Variable effects of C-terminal fusions on FLS2 function – not all epitope tags are created equal (Plant Physiol.)

A protein’s function and localization are often studied by fusing to it a small “tag” to enhance visualization (through the tag’s fluorescence or antibodies that recognize the tag). These tags are often assumed to have little effect on the protein of interest, but as Hurst et al. show using several…

The “PhenoBox”, a flexible, automated, open-source plant phenotyping data solution (OA)

High-throughput plant phenotyping systems are an excellent tool for analyzing large plant populations, providing better understanding of plant growth, productivity and performance under stress conditions. Unfortunately, high-throughput platforms are also high on costs and limited in their adaptability…

Breakthrough Technology: Soft X-ray imaging of cellular carbon and nitrogen distributions in cyanobacteria (Plant Phys)

Soft X-ray imaging is a promising new technology that can be used to measure elemental compositions of living cells. By adjusting the energy (wavelength) of the incident X-rays, it is possible to specifically measure C or N, which have different photo-absorption edges.  Teramoto et al. demonstrate the…

High contiguity Arabidopsis thaliana genome assembly with a single nanopore flow cell (Nature Comms)

Every now and then a technology arrives on the scene that suddenly makes everything easier. When I was a student, PCR was developed. More recently, CRISPR/Cas9 applications were developed, and now the hot tool is nanopore flow cell sequencing. The crucial advancement in this method is that rather than…

The Trojan Horse Approach to Protein Jockeying

In the decades since Agrobacterium tumefaciens was first used as a vector to deliver genetic material into plants (Zambryski et al., 1983), this powerful tool has provided important insights into the biological functions of countless gene products. However, this approach has its shortcomings; in addition…