Plant roots can grow without limit. To do so, they need to balance the production of new cells via cell division and elongation. Plant hormones known as brassinosteroids play a key role in this balancing act. New work unravels how brassinosteroid production is localized in plant roots for optimal growth patterns.
Plant diseases don’t stop at national borders and miles of oceans don’t prevent their spread, either. That’s why plant disease surveillance, improved detection systems, and global predictive disease modeling are necessary to mitigate future disease outbreaks and protect the global food supply, according to a team of researchers.
Due to their complexity and microscopic scale, plant-microbe interactions can be quite elusive. Each researcher focuses on a piece of the interaction, and it is hard to find all the pieces let alone assemble them into a comprehensive map to find the hidden treasures within the plant microbiome. This is the purpose of review, to take all the pieces from all the different sources and put them together into something comprehensive that can guide researchers to hidden clues and new associations that unlock the secrets of a system.
In plants, disease resistance proteins serve as major immune receptors that sense pathogens and pests and trigger robust defense responses. Scientists previously found that one such disease resistance protein, ZAR1, is transformed into a highly ordered protein complex called a resistosome upon detection of invading pathogens, providing the first clue as to how plant disease resistance proteins work. Precisely how a resistosome activates plant defenses, however, has been unclear.
The most comprehensive study of the family tree for legumes, the plant family that includes beans, soybeans, peanuts, and many other economically important crop plants, reveals a history of whole-genome duplications. The study also helps to uncover the evolution of genes involved in nitrogen fixation—a key trait likely important in the evolutionary spread and diversification of legumes and vital for their use as “green manure” in agriculture.
Researchers have shown that pea plants are able to make smart investment decisions when it comes to interactions with their symbiotic bacterial partners. Better understanding of how plants manage these interactions could help with the move towards sustainable agriculture.
A grass commonly used to fight soil erosion has been genetically modified to successfully remove toxic chemicals left in the ground from munitions that are dangerous to human health, new research shows.
Leguminous plants, like peas, beans, and various species of clover, obtain the organic nitrogen they need for their growth from symbiotic soil bacteria via specialized structures in their roots. Now researchers explain an evolutionary step in the symbiosis between plants and nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
Plant scientists say circadian clock genes, which enable plants to measure daily and seasonal rhythms, should be targeted in agriculture and crop breeding for higher yields and more sustainable farming.
Research has shed new light on the impact of humans on Earth’s biodiversity. The findings suggest that the rate of change in an ecosystem’s plant-life increases significantly during the years following human settlement, with the most dramatic changes occurring in locations settled in the last 1500 years.
