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New capabilities for assembling plant Rubisco in bacteria offer a revolution for enhancing photosynthesis. The technology provides a breakthrough to identify and test solutions for improving CO2 fixation by crop Rubisco.
Photorespiration was considered to be wasteful because it reduces photosynthetic efficiency. However, here a modified photosynthesis model, which incorporates photorespiratory nitrogen assimilation, suggests that photorespiration also has beneficial effects on carbon uptake.
The low number of mutations in multiple sectors from a 234-year-old oak tree reveals possible mechanisms to avoid the irreversible build-up of mutations in long-lived plants.
Sequencing of nested branches from a 234-year-old oak tree reveals a low number of somatic mutations accumulating during its lifetime, implying that mechanisms are in place to reduce these potentially deleterious mutations during ageing.
Resistance to moving sugars from foliage to roots is high in trees, suggesting that the transport mechanism found in herbs might not work in trees. Now with new measurements of phloem structure and leaf turgor pressure, it has been shown that the Münch pressure-flow hypothesis can also explain sugar transport in tall trees.
The phloem is the system of ‘blood vessels’ that translocates carbohydrates from the leaves to different plant organs. Here, using new structural imaging and pressure measuring tools, the researchers show interesting phloem structural changes that ensure a passive transport mechanism in tall trees.
Phosphinothricin resistance is a widely used trait in plant science research and agriculture. The BAR resistance gene that inactivates phosphinothricin has now been shown to produce two non-specific metabolites in planta. An engineered BAR resistance gene with no detectable off-target activity is developed to address this issue.
Economic and political systems can influence development for decades, shaping food production with lingering effects. These path dependencies of national and international agriculture are examined in a study that links wheat production in the United States and the vulnerability of poorer nations to food insecurity.
The development of an efficient transformation method for pollen promises to provide a simple and tissue culture-independent technique for genetic engineering in plants.
Current genetic modification methods require regeneration using tissue culture. This study now reports a type of transformation technology, pollen magnetofection, that allows production of transgenic seeds in multiple species in a fast, culture-free manner.
The herbicide-resistant BAR gene is broadly used in different plants. The current study reports the first crystal structure of the BAR enzyme and further demonstrate structure-guided engineering strategies to reduce the non-specific activities of BAR.
The Deg/HtrA family of ATP-independent serine proteases functions in a wide range of regulatory pathways. Here, the crystal structure of Arabidopsis Deg9 shows a novel oligomeric assembly of this nuclear-localized protease, an interesting octamer.
The wild grass Aegilops tauschii is a wheat progenitor. A high-quality genome sequence, along with methylome and transcriptome data, provides insights on domestication and the effect of transposons, and offers a resource for wheat improvement.
