Volume 7 Issue 7, July 2021

When Mr Yuan Longping passed away on 22 May 2021 at the age of 91, in Changsha, Hunan Province, China, the field of agricultural science lost a true giant. Mr Yuan was one of the greatest agricultural scientists of our time, and a hero who will be forever remembered in China and around the world. He devoted his entire life to the research of hybrid rice and made great contributions to global food security and poverty alleviation.

The antinutrient pyrimidines vicine and convicine are causative agents of favism in faba bean. They have surprising biosynthetic origins in purine biosynthesis, and the generation of the antinutrient-free faba bean varieties is now on the horizon.

A study of a synthetic auxin response circuit in a heterologous system suggests that hindrance of Mediator complex function by the co-repressor TOPLESS may represent a form of promoter pausing, a mechanism that has not been described in plants before.

This Perspective discusses the applications of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence in agriculture, highlighting the opportunities and challenges of using these technologies to achieve sustainable and precision agriculture.

While diurnal cycling of carbon and water use are critical for plant and ecosystem research, existing polar-orbiting satellites are incapable of providing such measurements. This Perspective evaluates the potential contributions of new satellites and platforms for Earth system models.

A prime-editing-library-mediated saturation mutagenesis method is developed and used to substantially expand the herbicide-resistant OsACC1 mutations, showing an advantage over base-editing-mediated mutagenesis in the in planta screening of functional mutations.

Plant diversity for agriculture has been found to increase biomass, but what about resource allocation? This study of two- to four-crop species mixtures finds increased productivity compared with monocultures but reduced harvest indices, since all of the crops studied have been optimized for monocultures.

This study showed efficient base editing of mitochondria and chloroplast genomes in both lettuce and rapeseed by DddA-derived cytosine base editors (DdCBEs), and DNA-free editing in chloroplasts by delivering DdCBE mRNA to protoplasts, which avoids off-target effects.

This study used bacterial cytidine deaminase fused to the DNA binding domains of transcription activator-like effector nucleases to enable targeted base editing in the Arabidopsis thaliana plastid genome, generating T₁ plants with inheritable homoplasmic mutations.

CBF transcription factors are central to cold stress responses. The authors show that only monomeric reduced forms can induce target genes. The redox status of CBFs is controlled by thioredoxin, isotype-h2, Trx-h2.

Vicine and convicine are the main anti-nutritional factors restricting the consumption of faba bean. Transcript profiling combined with metabolite profiling was applied to identify a key enzyme responsible for the biosynthesis of vicine and convicine in faba bean.

A new method for transgene expression in chloroplasts is developed, which amplified transgenes efficiently as a minichromosome. Such amplified transgenes can express foreign proteins and are maintained stably during plant development and inheritance.

A substantially improved robust CRISPR activation system, CRISPR–Act3.0, enables efficient and multiplexed gene activation in rice, Arabidopsis and tomato, and can be compatible with Cas12b and the near-PAM-less SpRY to expand the targeting scope.

An improved reference genome of sweet orange and newly sequenced genomes of its somatic mutants uncover the global pattern of somatic variations, the diversification and dispersal history of sweet orange and candidate genes controlling fruit taste and flavour.

Pollen apertures, the special areas on the surfaces of pollen grains that allow pollen tube emergence, show enormous diversity of patterns across plant species. Now a species-specific module formed by two DOG1-domain proteins is identified to control the formation of pollen apertures in flowering plants.

Thylakoid membranes must maintain a balance of their electrical and pH potentials, created by light-driven photosynthesis. Photoprotective mechanisms and electron transport are fine-tuned through pH oscillations mediated by K⁺ and Cl^– channels.