Mother trees, altruistic fungi, and the perils of plant personification
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...
Critical period for yield determination across grain crops
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...
Weed-induced yield loss through resource competition cannot be sidelined
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...
BTL2 phospho-switch surveils plant immunity
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...
Microalgae: potential novel protein for sustainable human nutrition
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...
Evolution of cereal floral architecture and threshability
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...
Let's go bananas with paintings
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...
Editing a rice CDP-DAG synthase confers broad-spectrum resistance
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...
Cyber-agricultural systems for crop breeding and sustainable production
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...
Signalling between the sexes during pollen tube reception
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...
Natural uORF variation in plants
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...
Four plus one: vacuoles serve in photorespiration
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...
The genetic and molecular basis of haploinsufficiency in flowering plants
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...
Medicinal plants enter the single-cell multi-omics era
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...
Moving beyond the arabidopsis-centric view of G-protein signaling in plants
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...
Enough is enough: feedback control of specialized metabolism
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...
Flower heterochrony and crop yield
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...
Applications and opportunities of click chemistry in plant science
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...
Promotion of oxidative phosphorylation by complex I-anchored carbonic anhydrases?
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...
Sensing and regulation of plant extracellular pH
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...
A general concept of quantitative abiotic stress sensing
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...
Filamentous pathogen effectors enter plant cells via endocytosis
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...
How does AT1 increase crop productivity under alkaline stress?
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...
Real-time calcium imaging in living plants
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...
Plant protection and biotremology: fundamental and applied aspects
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...
Single cell RNA-seq in phytohormone signaling: a promising future
Phytohormone signaling regulates plant growth and development. Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) provides unprecedented opportunities to decipher hormone-mediated spatiotemporal gene regulatory n...
HSFA1a: the quarterback of heat stress response and 3D-chromatin organization
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...
Plant virology: an RNA treasure trove
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...
Plant-TFClass: a structural classification for plant transcription factors
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...
Co-conserving Indigenous and local knowledge systems with seeds
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...
Nematodes: an overlooked tiny engineer of plant health
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)...
The ORFans’ tale: new insights in plant biology
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...
Dynamic interplay between nano-enabled agrochemicals and the plant-associated microbiome
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...
Plant morpho evo-devo
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...
Engineering stomata for enhanced carbon capture and water-use efficiency
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...
Endosperm: thermal sensor and regulator of seed thermoinhibition
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...
Multifaceted functions of histone deacetylases in stress response
Histone deacetylases (HDACs) are important chromatin regulators essential for plant tolerance to adverse environments. In addition to histone deacetylation and epigenetic regulation, HDACs deacetylate...
One hundred important questions facing plant science derived using a large language model
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€...
From farm to fork: future supply chains need to measure and trade nutrient content
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...
Harnessing biological nitrogen fixation in plant leaves
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...
The endomembrane system: how does it contribute to plant secondary metabolism?
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...