Volume 3 Issue 4, April 2017

The biodiversity of food plants is vital for humanity's capacity to meet sustainability challenges. This goal requires the rigorous integration of plant, environmental, social and health sciences. It is coalescing around four thematic cornerstones that are both interdisciplinary and policy relevant.

Whole plant nutrient signalling involves bidirectional exchange of signal molecules between roots and shoots. For nitrogen uptake, in addition to the root-to-shoot delivery of nitrogen-deprivation information, a shoot-to-root path is now defined.

Resurrection plants can survive extreme drying during periods of prolonged drought stress, maintaining a quiescent state for months to years until the return of water. Analysis of the genome and transcriptome of the resurrection plant Xerophyta viscosa links the evolution of desiccation tolerance to rewired pre-existing seed pathways.

The time of flowering is important in crop production. Rice has now been genetically engineered to respond to agrochemical spraying, which results in floral induction. This research offers new perspectives to control the phenological development of crops in the field.

The Malawian Farm Input Subsidy Programme has been credited with transforming the country's food security. However, an analysis based on net photosynthesis shows that production gains and the efficacy of fertilizer subsidies may have been overestimated.

It is shown that the balance of van der Waals and electrostatic forces can explain grana stacking in chloroplasts. Electrostatic forces vary with phosphorylation of proteins, producing contrasting effects on stacking and intra-membrane organization.

Plants evolved NLR sensors to detect bacterial effectors or their activity. A genetic analysis in Arabidopsis expands the role of the ZAR1 NLR protein. ZAR1 recognizes effector HopF2a through its association with pseudokinase ZRK3, inducing resistance without hypersensitive response.

In addition to the previously reported root-to-shoot nitrogen-deficiency small peptides, two more polypeptides are identified as phloem-mobile descending shoot-to-root signals and show a mechanism of systemic nitrogen-demand signalling.

A comprehensive gene stacking approach is used to rationally design rice varieties that combine multiple desirable quantitative traits to obtain both high yields and high grain quality.

Vascular plants use osmotic pressure differences to transport sugars. A synthetic microfluidic model explores the nonlinear dynamics of this process, showing that passive loading is sufficient to drive long-distance transport in large plants and trees.

It remains unclear how post-transcriptional gene silencing in plants discriminates aberrant RNAs from canonical mRNAs. Now, a study shows that the poly(A) tail of canonical mRNAs blocks RDR6 from converting them into the substrates for gene silencing.

The mechanism underlying vegetative desiccation tolerance (DT) of plants remains elusive. A study now sequences the genome and transcriptome for the resurrection plant, Xerophyta viscosa, and supports that vegetative DT arose by redirection of the seed DT pathway.

A Japanese group has developed an approach of generating transgenic rice plants with agrochemical-controlled flowering time by overexpressing a floral repressor gene, Ghd7, followed by transformation of an agrochemical-inducible florigen gene, Hd3a.

Photosynthesis is a fundamental life process but how photosystem II uses sunlight to split water remains unclear. Comparisons with enzymes from anaerobic prokaryotes suggest a possible mechanism for the photosynthetic O–O bond formation.