Volume 4 Issue 12, December 2018

Light is a critical environmental factor that influences nutrient uptake in roots and the subsequent use of nutrients, which is necessary to sustain plant growth. The positive effect of red light on phosphorus uptake has now been defined, along with the pivotal role of the phytochrome-B signalling cascades that mediate this effect.

Cellular components can be digested in the vacuole by autophagy, a critical process for homeostasis and stress tolerance. Functions of this recycling pathway in maize have now been defined, including lipid degradation, control of secondary metabolism and remodelling of the proteome.

How plants control the composition of proanthocyanidins has been the subject of much interest and speculation. The elucidation of parallel routes to the starter and extension units in Medicago provides an explanation.

There are multiple strategies to fortify crop nutrition and support global food security and sustainable agriculture. Here the authors propose to increase the diversity of crops by devoting more efforts to studying minor crops that are naturally stress resistant.

A Review summarizes our current understandings of vernalization mechanisms by comparing the vernalization genetic framework between Arabidopsis and grasses, and highlights the potential evolutionary origins of vernalization in various species.

The genes FANCM, RECQ4 and FIGL1 affect meiotic recombination in Arabidopsis. By examining the effects of their orthologues on recombination in three crop species, the authors find that mutating RECQ4 could be a universal tool for increasing recombination.

A substantially improved genome assembly of Medicago truncatula generated using PacBio sequencing allows for the analyses about genome rearrangements, transposable elements, new players and candidate genomic regions involved in nodule development.

Water content in plants increasing while the surrounding soil moisture decreases, measured through remote sensing on multiple continents, may be suggestive of a pulse–reserve mechanism that has not been observed on a large spatial scale before. This behaviour, triggered or rendered inactive by certain thresholds, is seen in biomes other than arid lands.

Proanthocyanidins (PAs) are a class of plant natural products that are involved in plant defence and are also beneficial to human health. Now a new mechanism is discovered to elucidate the origin of PA units and explain the diversity of PA production in different plant species and tissues.

In certain types of plant cells, organelle DNA accounts for a substantial proportion of cellular total DNA. Thus, it is hypothesized that organelle DNA could not only serve as the genetic material but also function as a ‘nutrient reservoir’. Now, the researchers demonstrate a mechanism involved in chloroplast DNA degradation and phosphorus recycling during leaf senescence.

It has been well established that nutrient starvation induces cell autophagy. Now, researchers present large-scale multi-omics analyses of maize autophagy mutants under nitrogen starvation, and show that autophagy could play more housekeeping roles in plants.

Peptides play important roles in plants. Identical CLE9/10 peptides can be perceived by two receptor complexes, depending on the tissue context, during the control of different developmental processes: stomatal lineage and xylem development.

The authors focus on PIN2 during cell division in root cells to investigate how polarity is maintained during cytokinesis. Re-establishment of polarity is a cell-intrinsic process that depends on secretion, endocytosis and other proteins, such as the WAG1 kinase.

Plants develop shoots and roots to access light, carbon dioxide, water and nutrients. Light intensity and quality are suggested to affect root nutrient uptake. Now, the researchers identify a mechanistic link between red light and phosphorus uptake by investigating 200 natural accessions of Arabidopsis.

The authors map chromatin accessibility after cytokinin treatment in Arabidopsis using fluorescence activated nuclei sorting and ATAC-seq. Regions of chromatin accessibility changes are preferentially located upstream of genes that respond transcriptionally to the hormone, and are enriched in type-B response regulator binding motifs.

RNA polymerase II (Pol II) catalyses the transcription of DNA in the nucleus eukaryotic cells. Now two approaches, global run-on and native elongating transcript sequencing (initially developed for mammalian cells), are used to determine the transcriptional landscape of Pol II in Arabidopsis. The similarities and differences of Pol II dynamics among various eukaryotes are also analysed.