Volume 5 Issue 10, October 2019

Much of the perception of the Green Revolution focuses on the broad techniques and resulting yields, but the socio-political dimensions of the project reflect a nuanced set of intentions and beneficiaries.

Radial growth of plants is one of the most prominent processes for generating biomass and the long-term sequestration of carbon dioxide on Earth. Now, the concerted action of a large set of transcription factors on the regulation of the process has been investigated.

The vascular cambium contains meristem cells that produce secondary xylem and phloem in the stems and roots of many plants. Its activity largely determines wood formation. Now, a genome-wide transcript profiling of Arabidopsis thaliana root cambium is presented to unlock the complex network that regulates cambium development and activity.

Plants frequently face trade-offs of growth and defence. One way for the switch is to produce defensive compounds from primary pathway intermediates. Here, the researchers characterized the biosynthetic pathway of an antibiotic diterpenoid in maize and revealed a crosstalk between maize secondary metabolism and gibberellin biosynthesis.

Gibberelins comprise a large number of species, with some being bioactive forms and the others being inactive. The different gibberelin species are interconvertible, and a new subfamily of cytochrome P450 enzymes has now been identified to be responsible for gibberelin deactivation in Brassicaceae.

Coumarins are a large class of plant secondary metabolites in the phenylpropanoids family. Now, a novel enzyme, coumarin synthase, is shown to catalyse a key step of coumarin synthesis in Arabidopsis roots and regulate iron uptake in alkaline soils.

There are three families of orange carotenoid protein (OCP), a cyanobacterial blue-light sensor. OCPX most closely resembles their common ancestor. OCP2 has fast deactivation and weak antenna interaction but does not dimerize, unlike OCPX and OCP1.

The 2.37 Å structure of a tetrameric photosystem I complex from the cyanobacterium Anabaena shows a dimer of dimers organization. This oligomerization is physiologically linked to cyclic electron flow and thylakoid membrane organization.