Tag: Research Methods and Tools

Loss-of-function mutants have been invaluable tools in the geneticist’s toolbox for more than a century. More recently, libraries have been developed of knockout insertion mutants at known sites. Here, a new Mu-transposon insertion sequence-indexed maize resource is described. This new collection,…

Biological processes are ruled by physical as well as chemical forces and properties, but the former are much less well understood and studied. Here, Michels et al. describe a collection of fluorescent probes that provide a quantitative visual readout of microviscocity, reflecting the physical properties…

PollenCounter is an open source, ImageJ based macro that splits RGB images of stained pollen grains into the primary channels. The program estimates pollen viability in plants through analyzing red (total number of pollen grains) and green (only viable pollen grains) images, after which the particles…

To understand gene function, it is necessary to study loss-of-function phenotypes. However, knockouts of some genes are lethal, which makes it impossible to study their loss-of-function phenotype. Although here are inducible overexpression systems and inducible knockdown systems, as yet there has been…

Optogenetics has revolutionized mammalian biology by its ability to fine-tune gene expression in individual cells by pulses of light. However, its application in plants has been challenging because the white light required for plant growth misfires the system. Ochoa-Fernandez et al. solved this problem…

In plants, stomata are involved in a host of responses, controlled by ion homeostasis in guard cells. In an attempt to understand the function of a plant chloride channel (CLC), CLCa, which transports chloride (Cl-) and nitrate (NO3-) in guard cells, Demes and colleagues sought to establish a relationship…

Plants (embryophytes) are by definition multicellular, but we seek to understand them as the sum of the activities of individual cells. Much of this knowledge rests on information obtained through grinding up tissues  made up from several cell types. This review by Luo et al. describes methods for plant…

Responses to a changing environment require an interplay between primary and secondary messengers. Hormones like abscisic acid (ABA), auxin etc. act as a primary messengers, whereas molecules like Ca2+, reactive oxygen species (ROS), other cations and anions act as a secondary messenger. In this paper,…