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 reveals that hydroxylated monoterpenes act as endogenous mimics of bacterial attack in tomato, triggering a self-amplifying jasmonate-dependent immune loop involving ROS, MAPK signaling, and volatile interconversion to enhance antibacterial defense.
This study demonstrates that CRISPR-mediated targeting of satellite DNA enables the rapid generation of stable, megabase-scale chromosome rearrangements in aspen during the first generation, bypassing the need for meiosis and overcoming limitations associated with long plant generation times.
This study reveals that the ATML1-GIR1-TPL/TPR transcriptional repression module negatively regulates glucosinolate biosynthesis and giant cell formation in Arabidopsis sepals by recruiting corepressors to suppress key metabolic genes like MYB29.
This study demonstrates that UAV-derived canopy height and volume exhibit high repeatability and moderate-to-high heritability across two growing seasons in a cassava breeding population, making them reliable traits for genetic selection, whereas relative growth rates are primarily influenced by environmental factors and better suited for analyzing genotype-by-environment interactions.
This study demonstrates that the loss of the PSI subunit PSAE in *Arabidopsis* enhances PGR5-dependent cyclic electron transfer by redirecting PGRL1 to photosystem I, thereby establishing the PSI acceptor side organization as a critical regulator of photosynthetic balance and CO2 fixation.
This study demonstrates that CRISPR/Cas9-based epigenome editing tools can successfully induce targeted DNA methylation at the promoters of susceptibility genes in cassava, thereby repressing their expression and conferring resistance to both bacterial blight and brown streak virus, although the resulting methylation patterns show limited stability across generations without the editing machinery.
Despite sampling across a gradient of human-altered landscapes, this study on red campion (*Silene dioica*) reveals that anthropogenic changes do not significantly impede gene flow or genetic diversity, as the species maintains substantial genetic connectivity through a combination of short-distance pollen dispersal and long-distance immigration.
This study characterizes tomato fruit RALF peptides, revealing that while SlRALF5 and SlRALF7 are conserved, bioactive regulators of cell wall signaling during ripening, SlRALF10 exhibits divergent structural features and lacks canonical bioactivity, indicating distinct functional specialization among fruit-expressed RALFs.
This study reveals that the porous, hygroscopic spines of the *Turbinicarpus alonsoi* cactus utilize humidity-driven swelling to straighten their pre-curved shape, thereby significantly enhancing fog water collection and directing it to the roots for survival in semi-arid environments.
This study demonstrates that transgenic rice plants engineered with maize C4 enzymes successfully exhibit in vivo flux through the core C4 reactions and CO2 refixation, establishing a critical framework for developing a functional carbon-concentrating mechanism to boost crop yields.