Brief Communications

This study identifies two genes that are important for protecting wheat against blast fungus, a pathogen that also infects related grasses. This work helps identify potential strategies for breeding wheat with improved resistance to this damaging fungus.

On the basis of 38,994 records of giant trees belonging to 237 species across Japan, this study shows that macroecological processes such as climate may drive spiritual ecosystem services obtained from giant trees.

The lack of haploid male fertility is a bottleneck to improve the efficiency in doubled haploid technology for accelerating crop breeding. This study shows that mutations in the parallel spindle genes are sufficient to restore haploid male fertility in Arabidopsis.

Endogenous formation of nitroxyl has been discovered by real-time detection in plant cells. Evidence shows that nitroxyl has a specific accumulation pattern different from nitric oxide in response to senescence- and hypoxia-induced redox shifts.

Species databases are critical tools for biologists and conservationists around the world, but a number of problems, including lack of common standards, are causing issues that even include the miscategorization of species as extinct when they are not.

Extant asterids comprise over 80,000 species of flowering plants. A fossil fruit from western North America shows that the lamiid clade of asterids diverged over 80 million years ago.

Comparative genomic analysis of 350 plant species reveals that cell-surface and intracellular immune receptor gene families co-expand or co-contract. This suggests an evolutionary relationship between the two branches of the plant immune system.

Vitamin D insufficiency is a major public health problem requiring dietary fortification and supplement solutions. This study produced gene-edited tomato lines that accumulate provitamin D₃ in fruits, offering a new dietary source of vitamin D₃.

This analysis looks at water use efficiency within and across multiple regions with different plant functional types, and finds that water use efficiency values tend to converge for some types despite distinct geographic and climatic zones.

An examination of the potential use of fruit and wood from olive trees on the coast of Morocco approximately 100,000 years ago.

By quantifying over 100 Cannabis samples for terpene and cannabinoid content and genotyping them for over 100,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms, this study finds that Cannabis labelling is associated with genetic variants in terpene synthase genes.

Field photographs are essential for research and conservation, but are difficult to access since there is no central database or connection between archives. The 25 leading databases hold only 53% of the plant species of the Americas, illustrating the need for increased work on collecting and standardizing this valuable data.

A prime-editing-library-mediated saturation mutagenesis method is developed and used to substantially expand the herbicide-resistant OsACC1 mutations, showing an advantage over base-editing-mediated mutagenesis in the in planta screening of functional mutations.

Not only is climate change having an impact on invasive plants through changes in ecosystem, atmospheric carbon may be changing the plants themselves. This analysis finds higher concentrations of parthenin at higher levels of CO₂, making an invasive weed more toxic.

Despite the perception that plant science focuses on strictly scientific criteria, this analysis finds that there is an aesthetic bias in regards to which plants, based on certain traits, receive more research attention.

Species once considered extinct have now, through improved taxonomic knowledge and collection activities, been restored, with lessons for conservation policies both in Europe and globally.

A targeted 75.5-Mb pericentric inversion was generated on the maize chromosome 2 by CRISPR–Cas9 technology in an elite inbred line.

The authors obtain a cryogenic electron microscopy structure of the cryptochrome blue-light receptor CRY2 in a light-induced tetramer complex. The key residues involved in oligomerization are characterized and validated by mutational analysis.

Genomic analyses of 101 plant species reveals a fundamental shift in the proportion of repetitive sequences in genomes above around 10 Gbp—species with the largest genomes are only about 55% repetitive, and this proportion does not increase further with genome size.

A new multicolour tool named PlaCCI allows for visualization and quantification of discrete cell cycle phases thanks to the sequential expression of three specific fluorescent markers.