Plant sciences articles within Nature

Featured

  • Career Brief |

    Hiring drive is part of campaign focusing on junior and senior scientists.

  • News & Views |

    A remarkable example has been discovered of a plant tuning its immune defence against a pathogen. The tuning consists of maximal expression of the relevant genes at the time of day when attack is most likely. See Letter p.110

    • C. Robertson McClung

  • Letter |

    Circadian rhythms regulate a wide variety of developmental and metabolic processes resulting in enhanced fitness. In this study, a link is made between plant immune responses and the circadian clock. Plant defence against a fungal pathogen which causes downy mildew disease in Arabidopsis is studied, and it is shown that a novel set of defence genes are regulated by the circadian regulator CIRCADIAN CLOCK-ASSOCIATED 1 (CCA1). The mechanism allows plants to 'anticipate' infection at dawn when the pathogen normally disperses its spores. Such a cross-talk mechanism reveals an important strategy for plants to time immune responses against pathogens.

    • Wei Wang
    • , Jinyoung Yang Barnaby
    •  & Xinnian Dong

  • Letter |

    Alternative stable states are common in ecosystems, and pose problems for management, but most studied examples are of strongly stable states that switch only rarely after major perturbations. This study fits a model of weakly stable states to a billabong system in which biological control is applied to an invasive weed. Frequent changes in water availability cause shifts between states in which control either is or is not effective. Understanding these shifts could allow intervention to keep the system in the controlled state.

    • Shon S. Schooler
    • , Buck Salau
    •  & Anthony R. Ives

  • Comment |

    Patrick D. Shirey and Gary A. Lamberti call for action to stem the rising tide of species redistribution caused by Internet sales.

    • Patrick D. Shirey
    •  & Gary A. Lamberti

  • Article |

    Nitrogen-fixing rhizobia use lipochitooligosaccharide (LCO) signal molecules to initiate a symbiotic relationship with plant roots. Although it has been suggested that mycorrhizal fungi also secrete chemical signals for this process, the identity of these molecules was unknown. It is now shown that like rhizobia, mycorrhizal fungi produce LCOs and that these molecules are important for the establishment of the symbiotic relationship between plant root and fungus.

    • Fabienne Maillet
    • , Véréna Poinsot
    •  & Jean Dénarié

  • News Feature |

    To learn the chemical language of plants, Ian Baldwin has built up a German research empire that engineers seeds — and a field station in the Utah wilderness to grow them.

    • Alison Abbott

  • Q&A |

    How to thrive as a plant biologist in a biomedical research environment.

    • Virginia Gewin

  • Article |

    Sugar efflux transporters are essential for diverse processes such as nectar production and seed and pollen development, as well for the maintenance of blood glucose levels in animals. These authors identify and characterize a novel sugar transporter family, SWEET, and show that several Arabidopsis, rice and metazoan homologues mediate glucose transport. In addition, some of these transporters are exploited by plant pathogens for nutritional gain and virulence.

    • Li-Qing Chen
    • , Bi-Huei Hou
    •  & Wolf B. Frommer

  • News & Views |

    An extension of synthetic biology to a medicinal plant involves the transfer of chlorination equipment from bacteria. This exercise adds implements to the enzymatic toolbox for generating natural products. See Letter p.461

    • Joseph P. Noel

  • News |

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

    • Natasha Gilbert

  • Letter |

    Halogen atoms have been observed in several different classes of natural product, but very few halogenated natural products have been isolated from terrestrial plants. These authors show that biosynthetic machinery responsible for chlorination events in bacteria could be introduced into the medicinal plant Catharanthus roseus. Prokaryotic halogenases function within the plant cells to generate chlorinated tryptophan, which is then used by the monoterpene indole alkaloid metabolic pathways to yield chlorinated alkaloids.

    • Weerawat Runguphan
    • , Xudong Qu
    •  & Sarah E. O’Connor

  • Editorial |

    An upbeat assessment of phosphate reserves leaves several questions unanswered.

  • News & Views |

    The crystal structure of a protein channel provides clues about the mechanisms that control the closure of pores found in the epidermis of plant leaves. Excitingly, the protein channel folds in a way never seen before. See Article p.1074

    • Sébastien Thomine
    •  & Hélène Barbier-Brygoo

  • Letter |

    The effects of biodiversity on ecosystem function are usually studied within trophic levels. These authors conduct a large experiment across trophic levels to show how manipulations of plant diversity affect function in different groups. The effects are consistent across groups, but are stronger at adjacent trophic levels and in above-ground rather than below-ground groups.

    • Christoph Scherber
    • , Nico Eisenhauer
    •  & Teja Tscharntke

  • Article |

    SLAC1 is a plant ion channel that controls turgor pressure in the guard cells of plant stomata, thereby regulating the exchange of water vapour and photosynthetic gases in response to environmental signals. Here, the X-ray crystal structure of a bacterial homologue of SLAC1 has been solved, and structure-inspired mutagenesis has been used to analyse the conductance properties of the channel. The findings indicate that selectivity among different anions is largely a function of the energetic cost of ion dehydration.

    • Yu-hang Chen
    • , Lei Hu
    •  & Wayne A. Hendrickson

  • Letter |

    Climate change is expected to shift the latitudinal and altitudinal ranges of species, but the low latitude or low altitude edge does not necessarily move as fast as the high edge. Here, demographic data on two tundra plants have been used to show that changed demographic rates at the lower edge are compensating for the warming climate, but that this effect will not last and a tipping point will be reached as temperatures get warmer.

    • Daniel F. Doak
    •  & William F. Morris

  • Editorial |

    African nations are laying foundations to extend the use of GM technology on the continent.

  • Article |

    The F-box protein CORONATINE INSENSITIVE 1 (COI1) mediates jasmonate signalling by promoting hormone-dependent ubiquitylation and degradation of the JASMONATE ZIM DOMAIN (JAZ) family of transcriptional repressors. These authors elucidate the mechanism of jasmonate perception. They present structural and pharmacological data to show that the true jasmonate receptor is a complex of both COI1 and JAZ. In addition, inositol pentakisphosphate functions as a critical component of the hormone receptor complex.

    • Laura B. Sheard
    • , Xu Tan
    •  & Ning Zheng

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