Volume 1 Issue 11, November 2015

Plant science has an important part to play in meeting the global food security challenge. But, advances will be most effective if better coupled with agronomic science and the broader food security agenda.

Plants contain several tissue-specific decentralized but communicating ‘clocks’. These control developmental outputs in response to environmental change: the vasculature clock for photoperiodic control of flowering, and the epidermis clock for temperature-dependent elongation.

Plants adapt to changing environments by optimizing the fitness costs associated with key biological functions. A comparison of a laboratory strain with other wild Australian accessions of Nicotiana benthamiana reveals that trading viral defence for vigour confers an adaptive advantage in arid habitats.

Wood formation drives the storage of carbon in trees and other woody plants. A detailed analysis of conifer xylem tissue formation reveals how the intra-annual dynamics of biomass production are recorded in wood.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are one of the most important groups of plant symbionts. The factors that regulate the exchange of resources in this symbiosis are explored in this Review.

High-resolution microscopies have recently provided new insights into the structure of the chloroplast thylakoid membrane. Its dynamics are vital to its function as the site of photosynthesis and so the source of energy for almost all life on earth.

Plant survival is greatly impaired when oxygen levels are limiting, such as during flooding events. A series of laboratory experiments with Arabidopsis thaliana suggests that the universal stress protein HRU1 coordinates oxygen sensing with ROS signalling under anoxic conditions.

Wood is the main terrestrial biotic reservoir for long-term carbon sequestration. High-resolution cellular-based measurements of wood formation dynamics in coniferous forests in northeastern France suggest that woody biomass production lags stem-girth expansion by over a month

Morphogenesis needs cellular polarity. In root hair cells initiation, ROPs, DRPs and PIP5K3 are recruited in bulging sterol-enriched membrane domains. A lipid-binding AGC kinase called D6PK modulates this establishment of planar cell polarity.

Circadian clocks regulate many biological processes. The authors show the existence of two decentralized tissue-specific clocks: one in the vasculature for photoperiodic control of flowering, one in the epidermis for temperature-dependant elongation.

The model and geographic location(s) of Asian rice domestication has been a controversial topic. Now a reanalysis of a previously published large genomic dataset, supports three geographically separate domestications of Asian rice.

The viral hypersensitivity of Nicotiana benthamiana results from an insertion in the RNA polymerase, Rdr1. Population analyses showed that the Rdr1 insertion originated from a population that trades viral defence for vigour in an extreme Australian habitat.