This Commentary, written by Emily Larson, is from the October issue of Plant Physiology. The spatial and temporal accumulation of auxins promotes and regulates polarized, gravitropic, and phototropic growth in plants. The proteins involved in initiating and maintaining the auxin gradients have been studied and remain active areas of research in the hormonal regulation of … Read more
Our understandings of the forces that have shaped Earth and the forces that have shaped life on Earth have common roots. Charles Darwin was famously inspired by the work of early geologists such as Charles Lyell, who proposed that Earth was subject to slow but gradual change. This idea recurs in Darwin’s insights about evolution … Read more
Chemical genetics is a powerful complement to conventional genetics. Rather than knocking out gene functions, protein (or other) functions can be perturbed through the addition of small molecules. One advantage is that several related proteins can be affected at the same time, avoiding the difficulties that come from genetic redundancy. Another is that treatment regimes … Read more
When is a flower not a flower? When it’s an inflorescence (cue laughter). Plants in the family Asteraceae produce inflorescences that look like single flowers, but are actually made up of hundreds of individual flowers. In many species, their are two types of flowers. The ray flowers (also known as ray florets) produce an elongated … Read more
The final major symposium of the Plant Biology 2016 conference was organized by ASPB President Richard Dixon and covered various aspects of specialized metabolism in plants (note that the term specialized metabolism has largely supplanted the older term secondary metabolism, which carries with it an implication that it is not as important as primary metabolism; … Read more
You are probably familiar with the process of making a transgenic plant; gene identification, gene introduction into a plant cell via bombardment or Agrobacterium tumefaciens, selection of transformed tissue, and plant regeneration (as shown in the diagram from Teaching Tools in Plant Biology). Many of you have probably carried out the process, at least in … Read more
This Research in Focus is written by science writer Peter Minorsky (ASPB and Mercy College) who writes the monthly On the Inside column for Plant Physiology. This summary describes a paper by Lacey and Binder, to be published in the July 2016 issue. The authors examine a putative ethylene receptor in cyanobacteria; this protein had … Read more
Arabidopsis thaliana has been an excellent model for the dissection of molecular plant-microbe interactions, including responses to pathogens. Studies in Arabidopsis have identified core components of signaling pathways involved in sensing and responding to pathogen associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), which including chitin (a structural carbohydrate of fungal cell walls) and flagellin (an abundant bacterial protein). … Read more
Transcriptomic data reveal how an organism or tissue expresses its genes (through transcription into mRNA) at any moment in time, and these data are extremely valuable when trying to describe plant growth, development and environmental response. For example, roots can be starved for the nutrient phosphate and the time course and pattern of gene expression … Read more
Snakebites kill more than 100,000 people annually, making snakes the second deadliest animals (after mosquitos), with many fold that many people suffering permanent disabilities from snake venom. Most of the victims are in Africa, Asia and Latin America, often in countries with poor access to medical resources. Snake venoms are complex and contain various toxins … Read more
Recently, we’ve been profiling first authors of Plant Cell papers that are selected for In Brief summaries. Here are the first-author profiles from the May issue of The Plant Cell. Xunliang Liu, featured first author of The role of LORELEI in pollen tube reception at the interface of the synergid cell and pollen tube requires … Read more
This week’s Research in Focus is reprinted from an In Brief published by Science Editor Nancy Hofmann in The Plant Cell, which summarizes an article newly published by Ma et al. This study explores the dual and opposing roles of the enzyme xanthine dehydrogenase in modulation of ROS metabolism during defense responses in Arabidopsis. Xanthine … Read more
This week’s Research in Focus is reprinted from an In Brief published by Science Editor Jennifer Mach in The Plant Cell, which summarizes an article newly published by Fortunato et al. This study explores the role of diatom phytochromes in sensing red and far-red light. In land plants, phytochromes sense red and far-red light and … Read more
In a study reminiscent of Jurassic Park, scientists have resurrected an extinct enzyme and watched it respond to today’s world. Rubisco is much older than dinosaurs; it is an ancient enzyme, billions of years old, and predates the origin of eukaryotes. Rubisco is found in all photosynthetic organisms, be they bacteria, algae or plant, as … Read more
This week’s Research in Focus is reprinted from an In Brief published by Science Editor Jennifer Mach in The Plant Cell, which summarizes an article newly published by Simpson and Ohlrogge. This study uses biochemical, morphological, and transcriptomic methods to examine an unusual surface wax produced by bayberry fruits, and reveals a cutin-related biosynthetic pathway … Read more
Learning to read a scientific paper is an important skill for undergraduate students to acquire, but selecting a suitable paper to read with undergraduates can be challenging (see this for example). The chosen research article should be accessible (meaning not too much specialized terminology or methodology), interesting, and meaningful. A new Plant Physiology paper by … Read more
BREAKTHROUGHS AND EVENTS CRISPR Science magazine named CRISPR the 2015 breakthrough of the year. Although the application of CRISPR-mediated genome editing in plants dates back a few years, the rate of its use has been growing rapidly. Searching PubMed for CRISPR shows an exponential growth in citation numbers. There’s no doubt that this technology provides … Read more
Plants that do the unexpected or that don’t conform to stereotype command attention and serve as portals to the diversity of the plant kingdom. Litter-trapping plants have an unusual and interesting strategy for obtaining nutrients. Zona and Christenhusz (2015), writing in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, describe plants that have evolved specialized adaptations … Read more
Metabolism is a widely-used term. It is used colloquially, as in, “My metabolism slowed down once I hit 40,” a usage that considers metabolism as a black box and focuses on its energetic inputs and outputs. Or, there’s the single-reaction view of metabolism, as in, “He doesn’t metabolize alcohol very well.” This view underpins the … Read more
*Note that we use the term biohacking as it has been used since 1988 to refer to DIY biology (Strange, 1988). More recently biohacking has been used also to refer to strategies to enhance the human body through wearable technology and nutritional supplements. Imagine a typical industrial process – say the production of gasoline or … Read more
