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In an attempt to ensure high standards of transparency and reproducibility, Nature Plants is introducing a plant-specific reporting checklist for authors — and making it a requirement for all refereed papers.
Buried seedlings must grow both strongly, to push through soil to the surface, and fast, to reach the light as quickly as possible. A recent study finds that a pair of sequentially acting E3 ubiquitin ligases balances these conflicting imperatives.
A broad-scale analysis of genic DNA methylation across the phylogeny of land plants reveals unexpected variation and provides insights into the evolutionary forces shaping it.
Major life cycle transitions happen after changes in stem cells trigger new developmental programs. In moss, expression of the homeobox transcription factor BELL1 is sufficient to induce sporophyte stem cells from the gametophyte phase, without having to go through fertilization.
Specific tissues are developed by legumes during symbiosis to host soil bacteria that will fix nitrogen from air. One single t-SNARE gene in Medicago can switch from a housekeeping to a symbiosome-specific function by alternative transcription.
Arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis (AMS) is a common mutualistic association in land plants. A comprehensive phylogenomics analysis identifies a set of genes required for AMS, and their importance is demonstrated experimentally with mutants.
In the moss Physcomitrella patens, a single gene called BELL1 can trigger the gametophyte-to-sporophyte transition, and induce embryogenesis and asexual reproduction without fertilization.
Control of cell death is crucial for plant life. A comprehensive screen for suppressors of BAK1/SERK4-mediated cell death identified a component of protein glycosylation pathways and ERQC, and its cysteine-rich receptor-like kinase (CRK) targets.
Photorespiration is a major light-dependent metabolic pathway that consumes O2 and produces CO2. Quantitative isotopic labelling experiments with sunflower leaves suggest that the O2/CO2 stoichiometric coefficient of photorespiration at the leaf level is very close to 2 under typical photorespiratory conditions.
How plant genic DNA methylation evolves remains elusive. Using methylome data covering the phylogenetic breadth of land plants, researchers show that evolutionary patterns of methylation vary considerably across species, genes and methylation contexts.
In photosynthesis, excess light energy is dissipated as heat by non-photochemical quenching (NPQ). The localization of proteins and their interactions in thylakoid membranes under high and low light conditions suggests that NPQ involves monomerization of the dimeric protein PsbS and interaction of the resulting monomers with components of trimeric light-harvesting complexes of photosystem II.
