Research articles

Rubber tree plantations have been displacing tropical forests in Southeast Asia, linked to global rubber prices. Forest-to-plantation conversion in Cambodia is correlated with shifts in rubber prices, with a time lag of under a year, showing the link between global commodity markets and deforestation in developing nations.

Photosynthetic organisms minimize potential harm from excess light by protection mechanisms collectively referred to as non-photochemical quenching. Two proteins involved in quenching, DAMAGED DNA-BINDING 1 and DE-ETIOLATED 1, are part of a complex containing CULLIN 4.

A sunflower pan-genome determined by sequencing about 500 accessions, including wild, landrace and cultivated lines, showed that introgression from the wild species has profoundly shaped the cultivar gene pool and contributed disease resistance genes.

A distinct feature of pollen gains is their resistant outer wall, called the exine, which is mainly composed of sporopollenin, the toughest biopolymer known to date despite an unknown detailed structure. Now, a structural model of pine sporopollenin is revealed by the application of new degradation chemistry and solid-state NMR spectroscopy.

The plant vacuole plays important roles in regulating growth and development. Now, the vacuole in Arabidopsis root cells is presented at nanometre resolution by 3D whole-cell tomography, suggesting a cellular mechanism for plant vacuole formation.

A high-quality reference genome for the plant Liriodendron chinense places magnoliids as sister to the clade consisting of eudicots and monocots. Population genomic analyses unravel the evolution of two distinct species in the genus Liriodendron.

The engineered Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9 variant SpCas9-NGv1, known to recognize relaxed NG protospacer adjacent motifs (PAMs) in human cells, can also mediate targeted mutagenesis with NG PAMs in rice and Arabidopsis. When fused with cytidine deaminase, it mediates C-to-T substitutions.

Detection of extrachromosomal linear DNAs in crops with large and transposon-rich genomes is challenging. Now an approach named ALE-sequencing is developed, allowing for the sensitive detection of active LTR retrotransposons in rice and tomato.

Peptides play important roles in plants. Identical CLE9/10 peptides can be perceived by two receptor complexes, depending on the tissue context, during the control of different developmental processes: stomatal lineage and xylem development.

The authors focus on PIN2 during cell division in root cells to investigate how polarity is maintained during cytokinesis. Re-establishment of polarity is a cell-intrinsic process that depends on secretion, endocytosis and other proteins, such as the WAG1 kinase.

Water content in plants increasing while the surrounding soil moisture decreases, measured through remote sensing on multiple continents, may be suggestive of a pulse–reserve mechanism that has not been observed on a large spatial scale before. This behaviour, triggered or rendered inactive by certain thresholds, is seen in biomes other than arid lands.

Plants develop shoots and roots to access light, carbon dioxide, water and nutrients. Light intensity and quality are suggested to affect root nutrient uptake. Now, the researchers identify a mechanistic link between red light and phosphorus uptake by investigating 200 natural accessions of Arabidopsis.

Proanthocyanidins (PAs) are a class of plant natural products that are involved in plant defence and are also beneficial to human health. Now a new mechanism is discovered to elucidate the origin of PA units and explain the diversity of PA production in different plant species and tissues.

The genes FANCM, RECQ4 and FIGL1 affect meiotic recombination in Arabidopsis. By examining the effects of their orthologues on recombination in three crop species, the authors find that mutating RECQ4 could be a universal tool for increasing recombination.

It has been well established that nutrient starvation induces cell autophagy. Now, researchers present large-scale multi-omics analyses of maize autophagy mutants under nitrogen starvation, and show that autophagy could play more housekeeping roles in plants.

In certain types of plant cells, organelle DNA accounts for a substantial proportion of cellular total DNA. Thus, it is hypothesized that organelle DNA could not only serve as the genetic material but also function as a ‘nutrient reservoir’. Now, the researchers demonstrate a mechanism involved in chloroplast DNA degradation and phosphorus recycling during leaf senescence.

The authors map chromatin accessibility after cytokinin treatment in Arabidopsis using fluorescence activated nuclei sorting and ATAC-seq. Regions of chromatin accessibility changes are preferentially located upstream of genes that respond transcriptionally to the hormone, and are enriched in type-B response regulator binding motifs.

A substantially improved genome assembly of Medicago truncatula generated using PacBio sequencing allows for the analyses about genome rearrangements, transposable elements, new players and candidate genomic regions involved in nodule development.

Assembling genomes to chromosome scale remains a challenge. Now, a study reports a strategy based on nanopore long reads and optical maps and uses it to produce high-quality chromosome-scale assemblies for the genomes of yellow sarson, broccoli and banana.

Root hairs are frequently used to study tip growth in plants. Most of the research was focused on the polarized tip region. Now, a mechanism involving PtdIns(4,5)P₂ and a plant-specific Rho-GTPase is proposed to be required for hardening the shank of growing root hairs.