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Quan et al. show that warming-induced changes in plant community height in a cold, high-elevation region enhance ecosystem carbon sequestration, emphasizing the importance of plant traits in shaping the carbon cycle under climate change.
The authors integrate spatial (Stereo-seq) and single-cell transcriptomes of the developing maize ear to produce an atlas of maize ear cells and their developmental trajectories. They also identify a pair of transcription factors involved in inflorescence development.
Wang and colleagues report a two-dimensional root carbon trait space coupled with the root economics space, offering molecular insights into the great diversity of root form and function.
Abiotic stresses challenge plant growth. In response, plants often rapidly accumulate proline. This study reveals the filament structures of plant P5CS, the key enzyme in proline synthesis, elucidating a unique mechanism for its efficient catalysis.
This study shows that optimizing soybean nodulation, rather than supernodulation, through editing improves N and C assimilation by balancing source–sink relationships. As a result, soybean yield and protein content are simultaneously increased in field conditions.
This study identifies PPKs as authentic protein kinases phosphorylating the far-red light photoreceptor phytochrome A and demonstrates that liquid–liquid phase separation of TZP promotes PPK-mediated phosphorylation of phytochrome A in far-red light.
Owing to its size and complexity, the genome of modern sugarcane has never been previously assembled in its entirety, which leaves it as one of the last remaining major crop species without a reference genome. The newly completed polyploid assembly of an archetypal modern hybrid reveals the complexities of sugarcane’s genetic past, and presents new opportunities for the researchers and breeders invested in its future.
The functions of a small family of non-secreted peptides, originally identified as critical communicators of the plant’s iron status, have expanded. The involvement of these effectors in disparate signalling cascades underlines the pivotal role peptides have in responses to the environment.
In this Review, Bergis-Ser and colleagues discuss how chromatin dynamics and nucleic acid metabolism impinge on genome integrity, both as sources of spontaneous lesions and as key contributors to the DNA damage response in plants.
Drought is a serious threat to global food security. In upstream research, crop drought-tolerant traits are often studied under extreme drought conditions, which can seem irrelevant in the eyes of breeders.
A triplet repeat expansion in Arabidopsis induces gene silencing that results in a severe growth defect. We show that an interplay between a SUMO protease and histone readers of active and inactive marks is required for this gene silencing, which highlights the importance of post-translational modifiers in chromatin remodelling.
In this Perspective, Vincent Merckx and colleagues discuss an important but overlooked aspect of mycorrhizal interactions, mycoheterotrophy, in the context of recent arguments about the importance of these interactions to forest functioning.
Repeat expansions can induce gene silencing exemplified by growth defects in plants to genetic diseases in humans. This paper shows key roles for post-translational modifiers, histone readers and the polycomb repressive complex in this gene silencing.