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 demonstrates that CRISPR-Cas9-mediated knockout of the *CYP79A1* gene in the elite grain sorghum inbred RTx430 successfully generates transgene-free, heritable lines with negligible cyanogenic potential, thereby enabling safer integration of sorghum into mixed crop-livestock systems.
This study presents high-quality genome sequences of purple and white-flowered *Aquilegia vulgaris* to elucidate the genetic basis of flower color variation, specifically identifying structural variants in the anthocyanidin synthase gene responsible for the white phenotype and confirming the presence of key flavonoid biosynthesis genes.
This study presents the development and validation of a cost-effective, mid-density 2,421-SNP array using the PlexSeq NGS platform that effectively supports diverse sorghum breeding applications, including genomic prediction and germplasm management, with performance comparable to high-density genotyping methods.
By integrating qualitative interviews with agent-based modeling, this study reveals that farmers' adaptive strategies—specifically plasticity for gradual change and bet-hedging for volatility—closely mirror plant biological mechanisms, offering a framework to co-design climate-resilient agricultural systems that align human decision-making with plant traits.
By integrating hyperspectral reflectance, inverse modeling, and network analysis in a common garden experiment, this study demonstrates that *Streptanthus tortuosus* populations exhibit distinct, heritable spectral signatures and coordinated trait networks that shift in response to historical and recent climate variations, offering a high-throughput framework for detecting population-level adaptation.
This study demonstrates that the neofunctionalization of a florigen paralog into a flowering antagonist (SP5G) created an evolutionary contingency that channeled adaptive flowering time evolution across diverse Solanaceae lineages through repeated selection of specific coding and cis-regulatory mutations during both wild adaptation and crop domestication.
This study demonstrates that maize landraces from Northern Argentina exhibit substantial phenotypic and biochemical diversity within and among accessions, with variation linked to collection-site altitude, highlighting their value as genetic resources for broadening the genetic base of modern maize breeding.
Despite significant reductions in nucleotide diversity due to maize breeding bottlenecks, transcriptomic diversity remains largely preserved through polygenic cis-regulation driven by multiple small-effect variants and diverse haplotypes that are constrained by purifying selection.
TimeTraits is an R package available on CRAN that utilizes Functional Data Analysis methods to extract functional traits from biological time-series data, demonstrated through its application in analyzing circadian clock bioluminescence changes in Arabidopsis following photoperiod shifts.
The study presents a non-invasive, image-based phenotyping procedure with focus bracketing that, by modeling disease intensities as a latent beta distribution, improves the precision of estimates while accommodating high spatial variability in wheat field trials, thereby shifting uncertainty from measurement errors toward biologically driven variability.