Tag: Tools and techniques

This review by Rai et al., part of a focus collection on metabolism, comprehensively covers the role of metabolomics in plant biology: its history, its tools and techniques, and its impact. As the authors point out, metabolomics bridge the gap between genotype and phenotype by providing a direct readout…

Cells are as small as life gets, but can be much larger than they appear if given room for expansion. This is possible with expansion microscopy, a technique that enables three dimensional cell imaging by physically expanding cellular components for visualization. Although expansion microscopy has been…

How can we precisely image plant tissues in super-resolution when approaching the optical limits of conventional microscopes? One solution lies in expansion microscopy, a technique that embeds tissue samples in an expandable hydrogel that proportionally increases the distances between structures, allowing…

Plants have several types of light receptors that control various responses to light, such as leaf expansion, time-of-flowering, and hypocotyl elongation. When seeds are germinated in the dark, their hypocotyl elongates rapidly because darkness is perceived as being deep underground; the elongation is…

Perspective: How should the advancement of large language models affect the practice of science? In this thought-provoking Perspective, four sets of authors express their opinions about the use of Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT) in the practice of science. Each essay is well reasoned,…

For living organisms, proper control of element location is just as important as the control of enzyme location, but harder to study. A new study by Ramakrishna et al. uses an exciting new technology, cryo nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry ion microprobe, to investigate elemental distribution…

Single-cell transcriptomics offer unprecedented insights into how plants respond to their environment. Although this technique is powerful, it requires extensive processing of the tissue (cell wall digestion to form protoplasts) prior to sequencing, which can induce additional transcriptional changes.…

The era of complete telomere-to-telomere (T2T) plant genomes is finally here! Recent advances in long-read sequencing technologies have revolutionized genome assembly, giving rise to gapless T2T assemblies and offering unprecedented insights into genome organization and function. Why are T2T genomes…