Volume 1 Issue 8, August 2015

The tremendous gains in crop yields seen over the twentieth century were underpinned by fertilizer use and manipulation of the aboveground parts of the plant. To meet the food demands of the twenty-first century, plant scientists must turn their attention belowground.

Raising the water productivity of crops, such that they yield more with less water, is one route to raising food production over the coming century. To achieve this goal, breeders must look beyond the conservative strategies that plants employ to cope with drought in the wild.

Rice breeders have independently selected different overexpression alleles of the same gene to increase grain length and grain quality.

Interaction of key regulators of exocytosis with potassium channels enhances both secretion and K⁺ uptake, making these processes intertwined and jointly coordinated.

GABA, a major brain neurotransmitter, was known to be important in plant development and stress responses. The discovery of an anion channel inhibited by GABA in wheat confirms its signalling role, indicating a convergent similarity between plants and animals.

Proteaceae in southwestern Australia exhibit a range of adaptions that allow them to both acquire and utilize phosphorus from some of the most phosphorus-impoverished soils in the world. This Review explores these traits and discusses those which hold promise for crop improvement.

The production of alga-derived lipids, a valuable source of biofuels, is restricted by the growth arrest of algae. Now a regulator of algal lipid accumulation is identified using an integrative chromatin signature and transcriptomic analysis.

Coordination between vesicle trafficking and osmotic solute uptake is needed for plant growth. It is regulated by the interaction between voltage sensor domains of K⁺ channels and a SNARE protein, conferring a voltage dependence on secretory traffic.

In plants kinesin-14 motors have been proposed as dynamic cross-linkers between actin and microtubule cytoskeleton. This study shows that OsKCH1, a kinesin-14 from rice, is a non-processive, minus-end-directed motor that transports actin filaments along microtubules.