Christina Rossetti’s gothic poem Goblin Market (written in 1859) opens with a list of seductive but dangerous fruits on sale from the goblin men of the title: apples and quinces, lemons and oranges, cherries, melons, raspberries, peaches, mulberries, cranberries, crab-apples, dewberries, pineapples, blackberries, apricots, strawberries, grapes fresh from the vine, pomegranates, dates, bullaces, pears, greengages, damsons, bilberries, currants, gooseberries, barberries, figs, and citrons. The list seems near endless and proves fatefully irresistible to Laura, who is ultimately only saved from their addictive grasp by her staunch sister Lizzie. Notwithstanding the abundance and variety of the fruits in Rossetti’s poem, these come from a very small subsection of the diversity that is available to plant biologists to investigate.

The advantages of working with model organisms is well documented. As are the shortcomings. These apply equally to plant and animal biology. However, flipping through the pages of biology journals (whether electronically or in actual physical hard copy), it often seems that plant researchers use the breadth of our kingdom more liberally than their animal-focused colleagues. Looking at just the contents of this issue of Nature Plants provides ample evidence of this.

Of course, the journal is not devoid of papers whose experimental system is Arabidopsis thaliana. One study surveys the primary transcripts of microRNAs to elucidate their processing and structures, which turn out to be far less predictable from sequence alone than previously hoped — although the data will certainly help to refine such bioinformatics models. However, the rest of the issue is made up of work performed using less interegated plants.

A BriefCommunication by Passalacqua and Gillis uses cross-species comparisons to find common patterns of gene expression in single-cell RNA expression data. The aim here is to identify genes with orthologous profiles in different plants that can act as signposts to aid the interpretation of further single-cell experiments. Given the nature of the experimental data available to these authors, the species coverage is quite conservative — but the thirteen species involved include plants as diverse as rice, soybean and apples.

Marks et al. look at the genetics and evolution of tolerance to desiccation in three grass species within one of the largest subfamilies of grasses: the Chloridoideae, which contains the agronomically important millets, amongst others. Species of Chloridoideae are ubiquitous in tropical and subtropical grasslands; the specimens for this study were collected in South Africa.

Martre et al. also investigate grasses, but in this case the staple cereal wheat. Their study uses published and newly collected field trial data, coupled with physiological modelling, to predict future nitrogen demands under varying climate change models. It makes for bleak reading, unless we can improve the nitrogen use efficiency of elite cultivars to be grown in the future.

Finally, there are two papers that look at the deep history of grapes: the family Vitaceae. You et al. sequenced DNA from 495 taxa to construct a detailed phylogeny of Vitaceae, which represents more than half of the currently known species within the group. Herrerra et al. report the identification of fossil seeds from grape species that flourished between 66 and 19 million years ago, including a species that represents the earliest example of a grape in the Western Hemisphere. The fact that these fossils show a large expansion of the family both in range and diversity after the Cretaceous–Palaeogene extinction event — as is true for many angiosperm groups — prompted a flurry of news stories that suggested, somewhat sensationally, that without the demise of the dinosaurs, wine would not exist!

This is just the diversity of plants studied in a single issue of Nature Plants. In previous months we have seen work on mosses, hornworts, liverworts, cotton, baobabs and many more. We are truly privileged to work across such a cornucopia of biodiversity.