Tag: Research Methods and Tools

Plant roots constantly engage in nutrient and water uptake for crop productivity. Increasing the nutrient uptake efficiency of roots will promote sustainable agriculture by decreasing the need for fertilizer applications. To achieve this task, we need to understand the physiology of intact roots in their…

If you ever tried to compare the results from two different experiments, you probably realized that small variations in the environment have big impact on how the plants grow. There is a lot to be learned from how the variation in the environment affects plant phenotypes, but currently the description…

Chlorophyll fluorescence is a common tool to investigate the behavior of the photosynthetic appratus, therefore photosynthetic capacity, at any physiological state. However, the different optical density of the samples can lead to light-dependent over- or underestimation of effective PSII quantum yields.…

New genome editing technology, such as zinc-finger nucleases and CRISPR/Cas9, are revolutionizing reverse genetics studies because they allow fast and precise genetic modifications in many species. However, they require efficient transformation and selection methods. This is notably a problem for algae…

Schmidt et al. demonstrate that nanopore technology can be applied to plant genomes https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.17.00521 By Schmidt, M. H.-W., Vogel, A., Denton, A. K., Bolger, A. M., Bolger, M. E., and Usadel, B. Background: An organism’s genome contains all the necessary information for its…

Shendure et al. provide a superb review of how DNA sequencing technology has changed over the years and how these changes open up new applications. They start with the Maxam and Gilbert chemical cleavage and the Sanger “chain-termination” methods developed in the 1970s, and describe the scale-ups…

Chromosomes are long, and DNA sequencing reads have typically been short, meaning that it is necessary to assemble lots and lots of short reads by looking for overlapping sequences. This strategy is made more difficult in repeat-rich and transposon-rich regions of genomes, which characterize many plant…

Ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation is important in many plant processes (growth, development, responses to stress) but little is known about F-box proteins, a key component of the SCF (SKP1-CUL1-F-box protein) E3 ubiquitin ligase complex, due to their unstable protein structures. Li et al. investigated…