Plant Physiology Article of the Week: Ethylene Regulates Auxin-Mediated Root Gravitropic Machinery and Controls Root Angle in Cereal Crops The spotlight is on Xiuzhen Kong, Yali Xiong, Xiaoyun Song, Samuel Wadey, Suhang Yu, Jinliang Rao, Aneesh Lale, Marco Lombardi, Riccardo Fusi, Rahul Bhosale, and Guoqiang Huang. Their findings contribute to a better understanding of root angle regulation and have implications for improving resource acquisition in agricultural systems. |
The Plant Cell Article of the Week: The S-acylation Cycle of Transcription Factor MtNAC80 Influences Cold Stress Responses in Medicago truncatula The spotlight is on Qinyi Ye, Lihua Zheng, Peng Liu, Qianwen Liu, Tuo Ji, Jinling Liu, Yajuan Gao, Li Liu, Jiangli Dong, and Tao Wang. Their study provides findings which reveal an important function of the S-acylation cycle in plants and provide insight into stress response and tolerance mechanisms. |
Plant Direct Article of the Week: GmDNJ1, a Type-I Heat Shock Protein 40 (HSP40), is Responsible for Both Growth and Heat Tolerance in Soybean
Global warming poses severe threats to agricultural production, including soybean. One of the major mechanisms for organisms to combat heat stress is through heat shock proteins (HSPs) that stabilize protein structures at above-optimum temperatures, by assisting in the folding of nascent, misfolded, or unfolded proteins. The HSP40 subgroups, or the J-domain proteins, functions as co-chaperones. They capture proteins that require folding or refolding and pass them on to HSP70 for processing. This study identifies a type-I HSP40 gene in soybean, GmDNJ1, with high basal expression under normal growth conditions and also highly inducible under abiotic stresses, especially heat.
The spotlight is on June-Sik Kim, Satoshi Kidokoro, Kazuko Yamaguchi-Shinozaki, and Kazuo Shinozaki. They provide insight into the adaptive strategies of plants to aid in the engineering of stress-resilient crop varieties that can withstand a changing climate.
The spotlight is on Annalisa John, Moritz Krämer, Martin Lehmann, Hans-Henning Kunz, Fayezeh Aarabi, Saleh Alseekh, Alisdair Fernie, Frederik Sommer, Michael Schroda, David Zimmer, Timo Mühlhaus, Helga Peisker, Katharina Gutbrod, Peter Dörmann, Jens Neunzig, Katrin Philippar, and Horst Ekkehard Neuhaus. Their study shows that the cold-induced degradation of FAX1 by RBL11 is critical for Arabidopsis to survive cold and freezing periods.
Cultivated crops are generally expected to have less abiotic stress tolerance than their wild relatives. However, this assumption is not well supported by empirical literature and may depend on the type of stress and how it is imposed, as well as the measure of tolerance being used. In this study investigated whether wild and cultivated accessions of Helianthus annuus differed in stress tolerance assessed as proportional decline in biomass due to drought and whether wild and cultivated accessions differed in trait responses to drought and trait associations with tolerance.
The spotlight is on Beibei Liu, Diya Yang, Dafang Wang, Chun Liang, Jianping Wang, Damon Lisch, and Meixia Zhao. In their study, they used hybrids as a model system to understand the initiation and maintenance of DNA methylation in maize, with a focus on CHH methylation whose functions are still not fully understood.
The spotlight is on Xiaobiao Zhu, Airu Chen, Nathaniel M Butler, Zixian Zeng, Haoyang Xin, Lixia Wang, Zhaoyan Lv, Dani Eshel, David S Douches, and Jiming Jiang. Their findings show the VInv gene and the VInvIn2En enhancer have adopted distinct roles in the cold stress response in tubers of tuber-bearing potato species.
Whether it is used as a food crop or a cash crop, barley production is the key to ensuring human food security. As a result, excellent performance of Barley seeds during grain development, seed dormancy, and germination are critical to guarantee high yield and quality, which also is the key to meeting the high production and market demand. This study aims to investigate the important role of high salinity inhibition on starch mobilization efficiency in delaying barley seed germination and embryo growth.
The spotlight is on Jana Kalvelage, Lars Wöhlbrand, Jennifer Senkler, Julian Schumacher, Noah Ditz, Kai Bischof, Michael Winklhofer, Andreas Klingl, Hans-Peter Braun, and Ralf Rabus. Their study provides insights into the structural properties of the chloroplast and the photosynthetic machinery of Prorocentrum cordatum.
The spotlight is on Yuxing Fang, Dongshu Guo, Yi Wang, Ning Wang, Xianwen Fang, Yunhui Zhang, Xiao Li, Letian Chen, Diqiu Yu, Baolong Zhang, and Genji Qin. Their findings reveal the important roles of OsTIE1 in rice stamen development.
The spotlight is on Liang-Yu Hou, Frederik Sommer, Louis Poeker, Dejan Dziubek, Michael Schroda, and Peter Geigenberger. The results from their study indicate plant redox proteomes are subject to dynamic changes in reductive and oxidative pathways to cooperatively fine-tune photosynthetic and metabolic processes in the light.
The spotlight is on Jie Wang, Norbert Bollier, Rafael Andrade Buono, Hannah Vahldick, Zongcheng Lin, Qiangnan Feng, Roman Hudecek, Qihang Jiang, Evelien Mylle, Daniel Van Damme, and Moritz K Nowack. The findings from their study provide information on the cellular processes occurring during developmental programmed cell death in plants which will be useful for future research into the molecular mechanisms of cell death execution.
Despite the significant impact of branching strategies on the yield performance of fruit crops, limited research has been conducted on SLs in these crops. In this study the transcript sequences of SL biosynthesis and signaling genes in olive (Olea europaea L.) were identified using rapid amplification of cDNA ends to predicted the corresponding protein sequences, analyzed their characteristics, and conducted molecular docking with bioinformatics tools.
FIBA Fundación para Investigaciones Biológicas Aplicadas 