
How to make an extraordinary machine: SMALL ORGAN 4 regulates ribosome biogenesis in plants
Ribosomes are essential molecular machines in the cell that translate mRNA sequences into proteins. Growing parts of an organism produce many ribosomes, so that after each cell division both daughter cells have enough to translate the proteins necessary for growth and development. Defects in ribosomes…

Expanded function of the P-type pentatricopeptide repeat protein ATP4 in RNA editing
Tianhu Sun
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2513-1387
Plant Breeding and Genetics Section, School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853
ts753@cornell.edu
Chloroplasts are semi-autonomous organelles that retain their own genomes derived from their cyanobacterial ancestors,…

Slice and Dice: DCL2 Mediates the Production of 22-nt siRNAs That Influence Trait Variation in Soybean
In plants, small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) serve as key regulators of gene expression. While 24-nucleotide (nt) siRNAs are produced by DCL3 and mediate transcriptional silencing of transposons and pericentromeric chromatin through RdDM (Borges and Martienssen, 2015), 22-nt siRNAs are processed by DCL2…

Excising the mystery of single guide RNA processing
Sophia G. Zebell
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA
zebell@cshl.edu
Over the past 10 years, utilization of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing in plants has rapidly and significantly altered the scale and scope of both basic research and crop development.…

Callose deposition during pollen development
Madeleine Seale
University of Oxford
maddy.seale@plants.ox.ac.uk
Callose is a cell wall component that is dynamically deposited and degraded during pollen development. Thanks to a new paper investigating pollen formation in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum), we now know that a pollen-specific protein…

A novel Trojan horse for molecule delivery into plants
Marc-Sven Roell1
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-2714-8729
1Institute of Plant Biochemistry, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Universitätsstrasse 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany
marc-sven.roell@hhu.de
The agronomic application of nanotechnology harbors huge potential for future agriculture (Landry…

Maize RNA Polymerase III Subunit NRPC2: New Kid on the Kernel Development Block
Dhineshkumar Thiruppathi 1,2
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2018-3356
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center,
Saint Louis, Missouri 63132
1Senior author
2Author for contact: dthiruppathi@danforthcenter.org
Seed (kernel) size affects evolutionary fitness and crop yield. In angiosperms, seed size…

Dynamic N1-methyladenosine in plant messenger RNA
Wei Zhang
ORCID: 0000-0002-5092-643X
Department of Plant Pathology, Kansas State University, 1712 Claflin Road, Throckmorton Hall, Manhattan, KS, 66506, USA
weizhang17@ksu.edu
Deposition of different chemical groups onto RNA generates diverse RNA modifications. All types of prokaryotic and…