Publicaties

A recent article highlights the growing doubts about the true role of the common mycorrhizal networks [CMN or wood wide web (WWW)] connecting the roots of trees in forests. It questions the claim of a...

Studies across different crops demonstrated that grain or seed number per unit area (GN m–2) is the dominant yield component. Although grains or seeds derive from floret or flower production and sur...

The recent article by Horvath et al. [1] claims that ‘competition for resources in well-managed agroecosystems is not the primary mechanism underlying the weed-induced crop yield loss’. We do not...

BRASSINOSTEROID INSENSITIVE1-ASSOCIATED KINASE1 (BAK1) is a co-receptor involved in the recognition of pattern-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) via plasma membrane-localized pattern recognition r...

To support a global population of ~10 billion people in 2050, dietary protein demand is forecast to increase 32–78% compared to 2017, requiring significantly higher planetary resources. Microalgae a...

Hulled grains, while providing natural protection for seeds, pose a challenge to manual threshing due to the pair of glumes tightly encasing them. Based on natural evolution and artificial domesticati...

We tell the story of the complex history and global distribution of the very popular banana and illustrate this with amazing depictions by artists and scientists. In addition, we discuss the major cha...

Lesion mimic mutations (LMMs) often confer broad-spectrum resistance (BSR) in plants, but with significant yield penalties. Sha et al. recently demonstrated that genome editing of the rice BSR gene RE...

The cyber-agricultural system (CAS) represents an overarching framework of agriculture that leverages recent advances in ubiquitous sensing, artificial intelligence, smart actuators, and scalable cybe...

Plant reproduction is a complex, highly-coordinated process in which a single, male germ cell grows through the maternal reproductive tissues to reach and fertilise the egg cell. Focussing on Arabidop...

Taking advantage of natural variation promotes our understanding of phenotypic diversity and trait evolution, ultimately accelerating plant breeding, in which the identification of causal variations i...

Photorespiration is inevitable for oxygenic photosynthesis. It has fascinated researchers over decades because of its multicompartmental organization. Recently, Lin and Tsay identified a vacuole glyce...

In diploid organisms, haploinsufficiency can be defined as the requirement for more than one fully functional copy of a gene. In contrast to most genes, whose loss-of-function alleles are recessive, l...

Elucidating biosynthetic pathways of plant specialized metabolites is a tricky but essential task for the biotechnological production of plant drugs. In a new report, Li et al. used a single-cell mult...

Heterotrimeric G-protein-mediated signaling is a key mechanism to transduce a multitude of endogenous and environmental signals in diverse organisms. The scope and expectations of plant G-protein rese...

Recent advances in our understanding of plant metabolism have highlighted the significance of specialized metabolites in the regulation of gene expression associated with biosynthetic networks. This o...

Crop improvement has focused on enhancing yield, nutrient content, harvestability, and stress resistance using a trait-centered reductionist approach. This has downplayed the fact that plants are deve...

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2022 was awarded to the pioneers of Lego-like ‘click chemistry’: combinatorial chemistry with remarkable modularity and diversity. It has been applied to a wide va...

The mitochondrial NADH-dehydrogenase complex of the respiratory chain, known as complex I, includes a carbonic anhydrase (CA) module attached to its membrane arm on the matrix side in protozoans, alga...

In plants, pH determines nutrient acquisition and sensing, and triggers responses to osmotic stress, whereas pH homeostasis protects the cellular machinery. Extracellular pH (pHe) controls the chemist...

Plants often encounter stress in their environment. For appropriate responses to particular stressors, cells rely on sensory mechanisms that detect emerging stress. Considering sensor and signal ampli...

Recent findings demonstrate that cytoplasmic effectors from fungal and oomycete pathogens enter plant cells via clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME). This raises several questions: Does effector secret...

Alkalinity constrains crop production. Recently, Zhang et al. reported a negative regulator, Alkaline Tolerance 1 (AT1), attenuating phosphorylation of plasma membrane intrinsic protein (PIP2) to bloc...

GCaMPs, genetically encoded calcium indicators (GECIs), contain an enhanced GFP (EGFP) sequence with significantly increased luminescence intensity. A hexapeptide GGTGGS connects the amino and carboxy...

There is overwhelming evidence that synthetic pesticides have a negative impact on the environment and human health, emphasizing the need for novel and sustainable methods for plant protection. A grow...

Phytohormone signaling regulates plant growth and development. Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) provides unprecedented opportunities to decipher hormone-mediated spatiotemporal gene regulatory n...

In eukaryotes, the highly complex chromatin exhibits structural dynamism to modulate cellular responses. Recently, Huang et al. have shown a novel role of the heat stress master regulator, HSFA1a, in...

Key principles pertaining to RNA biology not infrequently have their origins in plant virology. Examples have arisen from studies on viral RNA-intrinsic properties and the infection process from gene...

Transcription factors (TFs) bind DNA at specific sequences to regulate gene expression. This universal process is achieved via their DNA-binding domain (DBD). In mammals, the vast diversity of DBD str...

Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) holders have deep ecological, horticultural, and practical knowledge of plants, but this knowledge is not routinely considered and supported along with seed collec...

Plants have a long-standing co-evolutionary relationship with a diverse range of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, protists, and animals, which together make up the rhizobiome (see Glossary)...

Orphan genes (OGs) are protein-coding genes without a significant sequence similarity in closely related species. Despite their functional importance, very little is known about the underlying molecul...

The Green Revolution began in the 1960s and led to dramatic increases in crop production through the widespread use of agrochemicals, mechanization, drip irrigation, and breeding techniques [1]. Howev...

The effort to understand phenomena, such as the developmental changes underlying important evolutionary transitions in morphology, how development constrains (see Glossary) or facilitates evolution, t...

Stomata are pores on the surface of leaves and other aerial parts of plants that form between specialised pairs of epidermal cells, the guard cells. Stomata circumvent the impermeable cuticle barrier...

Seed thermoinhibition protects emerging seedlings from thermodamage by preventing seed germination at elevated temperatures. It had remained unknown how a seed fine-tunes its germination in response t...

Histone deacetylases (HDACs) are important chromatin regulators essential for plant tolerance to adverse environments. In addition to histone deacetylation and epigenetic regulation, HDACs deacetylate...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing rapidly and continually evolving in various fields. Recently, the release of ChatGPT has sparked significant public interest. In this study, we revisit the â€...

Our agriculture must currently feed eight billion people worldwide, and the global population is expected to increase towards 10 billion people in 2050 [1]. In parallel, roughly one billion people are...

The increasing human population and global climate change are putting significant pressure on agricultural production and global food supply. Although chemical nitrogen fertilizers have provided an ef...

Plants have evolved survival strategies in response to their surrounding environment via the biosynthesis of highly diversified PSMs (see Glossary). In turn, these are used as precursors to synthesize...