Model plants articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    Sequencing of the Arabidopsis thaliana root microbiome shows that its composition is strongly influenced by location, inside or outside the root, and by soil type.

    • Derek S. Lundberg
    • , Sarah L. Lebeis
    •  & Jeffery L. Dangl

  • News & Views |

    A type of sugar transporter has been discovered that exports glucose from cells. In plants, these transporters are targeted by disease-causing microbes that divert sugar production for their own use. See Article p.527

    • Nicholas J. Talbot

  • News |

    Science partnership aims to jump-start growth rate in rice yields.

    • Natasha Gilbert

  • Letter |

    Self-fertilisation (selfing) in plants is prevented mainly by the self-incompatibility recognition system, which consists of male and female specificity genes and modifier genes. Selfing does occur in Arabidopsis plants, but it is not known how it arose. Here it is reported that selfing in Arabidopsis results from a geographically widespread, 213-base-pair inversion within the male specificity gene. When this inversion is returned to its original orientation, selfing is prevented once more.

    • Takashi Tsuchimatsu
    • , Keita Suwabe
    •  & Kentaro K. Shimizu

  • Letter |

    Making haploid plants — which inherit chromosomes from only one parent — is useful for genetic research and also, crucially, for plant breeding. A new method for generating haploid Arabidopsis plants is now described, involving the manipulation of a single centromeric protein, CENH3. When cenh3 null plants are crossed with wild-type plants, the mutant chromosomes are eliminated, producing haploid progeny.

    • Maruthachalam Ravi
    •  & Simon W. L. Chan

  • Letter |

    Here, large-scale genome-wide association studies were carried out with the naturally occurring inbred lines of Arabidopsis thaliana, which can be genotyped once and phenotyped repeatedly. The results range from significant associations, usually corresponding to single genes, to findings that are more difficult to interpret, because confounding by complex genetics and population structure makes it hard to distinguish true associations from false.

    • Susanna Atwell
    • , Yu S. Huang
    •  & Magnus Nordborg

  • Letter |

    Female gametes in flowering plants develop from a meiotic division of a precursor cell followed by mitotic divisions of one of the resulting haploid cells to yield the gametophyte. Here, ARGONAUTE 9 (AGO9) — a protein involved in RNA interference — is identified as a factor required for specification of the gametophyte. AGO9 is found not in the cell destined to be the gametophyte, but in the neighbouring companion cells, suggesting that it functions in a non-cell-autonomous manner.

    • Vianey Olmedo-Monfil
    • , Noé Durán-Figueroa
    •  & Jean-Philippe Vielle-Calzada

  • Letter |

    During development in Arabidopsis plants, populations of shoot stem cells and root stem cells are established at the embryo's apical and basal poles, respectively. PLETHORA genes are master regulators of root fate, but the regulators of shoot fate were unknown. Here, CLASS III HOMEODOMAIN-LEUCINE ZIPPER genes are identified as master regulators of apical/shoot fate, and are shown to be sufficient to convert the embryonic root pole into a second shoot pole.

    • Zachery R. Smith
    •  & Jeff A. Long

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