246 papers
Plant biology explores the intricate lives of the green world, from the microscopic machinery inside a leaf to how entire forests adapt to a changing climate. This field investigates everything from how roots drink water to the complex chemical signals plants use to communicate, offering vital insights into food security and environmental resilience.
On Gist.Science, we make these discoveries accessible by processing every new preprint in this category directly from bioRxiv. For each study, we provide both a plain-language overview for curious minds and a detailed technical summary for researchers, ensuring that the latest findings in plant science are clear and actionable. Below are the most recent papers in plant biology, freshly summarized for you to explore.
This study utilizes AlphaFold3 to construct a cross-kingdom interactome between *Medicago truncatula* and *Sinorhizobium meliloti*, identifying a DNF2-centered molecular framework involving specific rhizobial proteins that is essential for maintaining symbiotic accommodation and nitrogen fixation in root nodules.
This study reveals that the plant immune protein DM3 regulates its prolyl aminopeptidase activity through dynamic, salt-sensitive assembly into inactive helical filaments, a mechanism that allows the enzyme to switch between immune signaling and abiotic stress tolerance roles.
This paper introduces Botanic1, a family of long-context, agent-integrated genomic language models trained on unannotated plant data that outperform existing models in predicting trait-associated regions and provide biological insights through mechanistic interpretability, all while being made available to the research community to accelerate climate-resilient crop development.
This study reveals that very-long-chain fatty acids (VLCFAs) synthesized in the outermost layer of Arabidopsis callus non-cell-autonomously suppress cytokinin signaling to restrict procambium identity and establish the middle-cell layer, thereby controlling cellular pluripotency and shoot regeneration through inter-cell layer communication.
This study reveals that in *Physcomitrium patens*, the sulfated peptide hormone PSY promotes growth by binding to and inactivating its membrane-localized receptor kinases (PSYR1/2), which otherwise constitutively inhibit development through active kinase signaling.
Despite a century of soybean breeding successfully increasing photosynthetic capacity and yield, it has failed to improve the speed of NPQ relaxation, indicating that photoprotective regulation has not kept pace with gains in photosynthetic performance.
This study demonstrates that transferring seed microbiomes from healthy donors can counteract the intergenerational legacy of antibiotic-induced dysbiosis in tomato plants by restoring rhizosphere community composition, reactivating defense gene expression, and suppressing foliar disease susceptibility.
The Eucalyptus MicroRNA Archive (EMA) is a publicly accessible, curated database that integrates three independent small RNA sequencing datasets to establish a standardized, evidence-tiered catalog of 99 miRNAs and their functional target networks in *Eucalyptus grandis*, addressing previous fragmentation in annotations and providing a reproducible framework for research in non-model woody species.
This study demonstrates that a framework combining automated time-resolved volatile organic compound (VOC) profiling and machine learning can accurately and non-invasively predict soybean phenological progression, offering a practical tool for crop monitoring that overcomes the limitations of visual observation after canopy closure.
This study demonstrates that the Arabidopsis transcription factor GLABRA2 (GL2) regulates epidermal development by recruiting TPL/TPR corepressors through its conserved N-terminal EAR motif to mediate chromatin remodeling and gene expression repression.