Rapid single-step affinity purification of HA-tagged plant mitochondria (Plant Physiol)
Plant Science Research WeeklyIn the middle part of the 20th century, cell biology leapt forward with the development of differential centrifugation methods for purifying subcellular compartments. However, these methods require large amounts of starting material and can suffer from contamination. Kuhnert et al. present a new simple…
Antimicrobial solid media for screening non-sterile Arabidopsis thaliana seeds (bioRxiv)
Plant Science Research WeeklyTransgenic plant production often involves an agar-based selection step in which plants that have taken up the introduced DNA (containing a selectable marker) show resistance to a corresponding antibiotic. Typically, putatively transformed seeds are surface sterilized prior to plating so that microbes…
Review: Design and engineering of advanced plant optogenetics systems (TIPS)
Plant Science Research Weekly
Review: Design and engineering of advanced plant optogenetics systems
Optogenetics uses light-sensitive proteins to trigger specific outputs in the cell in response to particular wavelengths of light. Many optogenetic systems use chimeric proteins that contain different sensor and effector…
The use of high throughput phenotyping for assessment of heat stress-induced changes in Arabidopsis (bioRxiv)
Plant Science Research WeeklyWith global temperatures rising, tolerance to heat is becoming increasingly important as a breeding target for crop plants, but it is a highly complex response that includes processes including plant cooling capacity, growth recovery, and maintenance of photosynthesis. Using Arabidopsis, Gao et al. developed…
Next-Gen sequence databases: RNA and genomic informatics resources for plants (Plant Physiol)
Plant Science Research WeeklyDrawing on more than 15 years of improvements, Nakano et al. have released public websites and resources for data access, display, and analysis of plant small RNAs, from Arabidopsis to wheat and with many crops and model species represented. The tools can analyze, integrate and display the abundance…
Protocol for rapid clearing and staining of fixed Arabidopsis ovules for improved imaging by confocal laser scanning microscopy (Plant Methods)
Plant Science Research WeeklyThis is a very interesting paper that provide a new, fast and easy protocol, with specific step-by-step instructions, for a trustworthy imaging with cellular resolution of fixed Arabidopsis ovules at different developmental stages. The authors combine two previously outlined techniques: clearing of fixed…
Gene-editing in somatic cells can be achieved by spray-on of carbon dots (bioRxiv)
Plant Science Research WeeklyIt’s known to all that plant biotechnology can enhance food security, but there are also inevitable disadvantages of these new approaches. At present, introducing DNA into a plant genome is slow and expensive. Recently, Doyle et al. developed a new method which claims to be simple, inexpensive, fast,…
Plants with self-sustained luminescence (bioRxiv)
Plant Science Research WeeklyNothing beats being able see gene expression in real time and space. In recent years, plant biologists have made great strides in understanding plants by using the visual reporters GUS, green fluorescent protein (and other fluorescent proteins) and luciferase. Each of these requires either a substrate…
CRISPR-TSKO: A technique for efficient mutagenesis in specific cell types, tissues, or organs in Arabidopsis ($) (Plant Cell)
Plant Science Research WeeklyThe ability to introduce base-specific changes through CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing has given scientists fantastic tools with which to understand and modify the genes that control plant development and physiology. New tools and refinements to this toolkit are being developed rapidly. In this new work, Decaestecker…