📄 Category

plant biology

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.

📄 plant biology

Untargeted metabolic analysis reveals intraspecific and organ-specificchemodiversity in Solanum dulcamara

This study utilizes untargeted metabolomics on 42 globally distributed *Solanum dulcamara* accessions to demonstrate that intraspecific chemodiversity is primarily driven by organ-specific metabolic profiles and accession-specific variations, leading to the identification of four distinct steroidal glycoalkaloid chemotypes in leaves and flowers while finding no significant correlation with geographic origin or altitude.

Mendoza-Servin, J. V., Moreno-Pedraza, A., Pires Bueno, P. C., van Dam, N. M.2026-07-30
📄 plant biology

Comparative epigenomics across the barley pangenome links structural variation to regulatory genome function

By integrating multi-omics data across 20 barley genotypes, this study reveals that while structural variants do not globally remodel the epigenome, they drive regulatory diversity and growth habit variation through context-dependent rewiring of local chromatin interactions.

Zhu, Z., Chen, E., Navratilova, P., Schreiber, M., Padmarasu, S., Koenig, P., Himmelbach, A., Macaulay, M., Waugh, R., M (…)2026-07-27
📄 plant biology

PWO1 and TRB proteins coordinate chromatin regulation to prevent premature differentiation and ectopic lignin deposition in Arabidopsis

This study reveals that the evolutionarily conserved interaction between Arabidopsis PWO1 and TRB proteins coordinates chromatin regulation to suppress premature differentiation and ectopic lignin deposition by jointly controlling the expression of genes involved in secondary cell wall formation.

Khan, A., Kusova, A., Skalak, J., Ghosh, B., Yang, T., Kelling, A. L. V., Hagemann, L., Panigrahi, K. C. S., Hejatko, J. (…)2026-07-27
📄 plant biology

Selective repurposing of the eukaryotic DNA replication machinery by a plant virus

Using proximity labeling and functional assays, this study reveals that geminiviruses selectively repurpose specific host DNA replication factors, including DNA polymerase delta, to form a viral replisome that supports their rolling-circle genome replication via a leading-strand mode.

Shi, C., Medina-Puche, L., Pott, D. M., Wei, H., Acatay, S., Krenz, B., Hanley-Bowdoin, L., Lozano-Duran, R.2026-07-24
📄 plant biology

CRISPR-Cas9 Induced Knockout of BEL5 in Tetraploid Potato: Optimized Methodology via Repeated de novo Regeneration and Impact on Tuberization

This study establishes an optimized CRISPR-Cas9 methodology involving repeated de novo regeneration to achieve complete knockout of the BEL5 gene in tetraploid potato, revealing that while BEL5 regulates the timing of tuberization onset, it is dispensable for overall tuber yield.

Zounkova, A., Chirivi, D., Pribylova, A., Martignago, D., Myslivcova, J., Masek, T., Fischer, L., Betti, C., Fornara, F. (…)2026-07-22
📄 plant biology

Vision Normalizing Flows for the probability-informed detection of banana diseases from in-field images

This paper presents a lightweight, probabilistic image-recognition framework that leverages frozen DINOv3 embeddings and conditional normalizing flows to achieve near-perfect accuracy in detecting five major banana diseases from in-field images while providing interpretable uncertainty estimates for scalable deployment in smallholder farming systems.

Prusokiene, A., Prusokas, A., Retkute, R.2026-07-21
📄 plant biology

Rapid plastid isolation reveals the chloroplast proteome and structures of the chlororibosome large subunit and RuBisCO in Marchantia polymorpha

This study introduces an optimized rapid isolation protocol for *Marchantia polymorpha* chloroplasts to characterize their proteome and determine high-resolution cryo-EM structures of the chlororibosome large subunit and RuBisCO, revealing that despite ancestral genome reduction, bryophyte plastids maintain a high level of structural conservation and complexity comparable to angiosperms.

Raval, P. K., Mitchell, C., Lozano-Quiles, M., O'Keefe, S., Nyman, T. A., Battersby, B., Butcher, S. J., Gould, S. B.2026-07-20
📄 plant biology

High-resolution transcriptomic profiling of Arabidopsis thaliana across a 37°C-40°C thermal gradient

This study utilizes high-resolution RNA-seq profiling across a 37°C–40°C thermal gradient in Arabidopsis thaliana to reveal that distinct, temperature-specific fine-tuning of the heat shock response within this narrow range dictates the successful acquisition of acquired thermotolerance.

Gillham, E., Hu, J., Huang, Y., Kochi, A., McDonald, K., Scott-Joseph, C., Xu, C., Ye, M., Kaplinsky, N.2026-07-20
📄 plant biology

Natural variation in NifU and NifS enhances chloroplasts compatibility for nitrogenase engineering

This study demonstrates that selecting specific NifU and NifS homologs from diverse diazotrophs, particularly *Marinobacter lutimaris*, is critical for engineering nitrogenase in plants because it balances the biochemical requirement for [Fe-S] cluster assembly with the need to minimize physiological disruption and proteome alterations in the host chloroplast.

Ene-Ordorica, M., Vaca-Sanz, C., Makarovsky-Saavedra, N., Sanchez, A. O., Blasio, F., Curatti, L., Caro, E., Rubio, L. M (…)2026-07-17