December 18, 2023

🎄 The Week in Botany, December 18, 2023

Welcome to the last Week in Botany for the year. I’ll be taking the last week of the year off, so there’ll be no email on December 25, and no data for an email on January 1. That means I expect I’ll send the next email January 8. If you’re feeling email withdrawal symptoms, Annals of Botany has an email list where they’ll be sharing new AnnBot papers and news about special issues.

I can feel myself grinding to a halt as the year comes to an end, so I’ll be taking the opportunity to take a break. I hope you can find time to do the same. Until next time, take care.

Alun (webmaster@botany.one)

On Botany One

Towards Super-High Yielding Rice: A Novel Approach to Optimize Grain Filling
A novel systems model, in conjunction with genetic algorithms, identifies ideotypes with high yield potential.

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News & Views

Farmers Are Turning To An Ancient Practice To Improve Agriculture
From ancient Egypt to medieval England, cultivating one or more crops in the same field was common practice among many farmers for thousands of years. However, in the last century, food producers largely stopped ‘intercropping’ and moved towards an industrial type of agriculture – a shift that contributed to 34% of the world’s farmland being degraded today.

Opinion: Nude Gardening calendar - organic gardeners bare all for a good cause
The Soil & Health Association of New Zealand has launched its first calendar. The Nude Gardening 2024 Calendar features people gardening au naturel in Aotearoa, in a tribute to organic growing practices. An enthusiastic, yet professional, Kem Ormond investigates.

Discovery inside unearthed bottle would’ve shocked Michigander who buried it in 1879
In 1879, botanist William J. Beal filled 20 bottles with soil and seeds and buried them on what is now MSU’s campus grounds. In April 2021, the 16th bottle was unearthed, and its seeds were planted. Now, MSU scientists have discovered not all the seeds were quite what they seemed to be.

Tomato Space Scandal Resolved As ISS Fruit Found After 8 Months Missing
This is Ground Control to errant tom, you've really caused a scene.

Stop Planting Trees, Says Guy Who Inspired World to Plant a Trillion Trees
Ecologist Thomas Crowther’s research inspired countless tree-planting campaigns, greenwashing, and attacks from scientists. Now he’s back with a new plan for nature restoration.

Inside the Illegal Cactus Trade
As the craze for succulents continues, sometimes the smuggler and the conservationist are the same person.

I discovered … a tiny 700-year-old forest within sight of North America’s busiest highway
I realised other ancient trees could have survived, right under our noses. In France, they discovered one tree that had started growing before the Romans left.

What Murder Mysteries Get Wrong about Gardens and Poisonous Plants
Murder mysteries and gardens go together like peanut butter and jelly or milk with cookies. Many of the classic detectives, from Ms. Marple to Nero Wolfe, have a preoccupation with gardens and/or plants. And with gardens and plants, there are poisonous plants awaiting a murderer’s deft touch.

Smart planting key to beating caterpillar damage
Cabbage white butterflies — Pieris rapae — are one of the most common garden visitors. The butterfly looks elegant in white with black dots on its wings: females have a pair of black spots and males a single spot on each forewing. But their velvety green caterpillars are ravenous beasts on brassicas — the plant family that includes common vegetable crops such as cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, kale and bok choy.

The lesser-known Latin American history behind the poinsettia flower
Poinsettia plants are used to adorn stores, are printed on Christmas cards and are seen as the traditional Christmas flower. Their history begins with Indigenous communities from Latin America but is often erased according to professors and journalists.

Scientific Papers

Regulation of Rubisco activity in crops (OA)
Efficient plant acclimation to changing environmental conditions relies on fast adjustments of the transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome. Regulation of enzyme activity depends on the activity of specific chaperones, chemical post-translational modifications (PTMs) of amino acid residues, and changes in the cellular and organellar microenvironment. Central to carbon assimilation, and thus plant growth and yield, Rubisco activity is regulated by its chaperone Rubisco activase (Rca) and by adjustments in the chloroplast stroma environment. Focused on crops, Amaral et al. highlight the main PTMs and stromal ions and metabolites affecting Rubisco and Rca in response to environmental stimuli.

Food plants in Brazil: origin, economic value of pollination and pollinator shortage risk ($)
Pollination is a key ecosystem service of critical importance for food production. However, globally, several regions are already experiencing pollinator shortage as pollinators are declining. Oliveira et al. investigate the origin, pollinator dependence and economic value of 199 food crops cultivated in Brazil to understand to which extent (1) Brazilian agriculture is vulnerable to pollinator shortage, and (2) Brazilian society has already achieved a comprehensive perspective about crop dependence.

Dispersal from Africa to the Neotropics was followed by multiple transitions across Neotropical biomes facilitated by frugivores (OA)
Plant disjunctions have fascinated biogeographers and ecologists for a long time. Lopes et al. use tribe Bocageeae (Annonaceae), a predominantly Neotropical plant group distributed across several present-day Neotropical biomes and with an African–American disjunction, to investigate long-distance dispersal mediated by frugivorous animals at both intercontinental and intracontinental scales.

Crop rotation and native microbiome inoculation restore soil capacity to suppress a root disease (OA)
It is widely known that some soils have strong levels of disease suppression and prevent the establishment of pathogens in the rhizosphere of plants. However, what soils are better at suppressing disease, and how management can help us to boost disease suppression remain unclear. Zhou et al. used field, greenhouse and laboratory experiments to investigate the effect of management (monocropping and rotation) on the capacity of rhizosphere microbiomes in suppressing peanut root rot disease.

Quantifying error in occurrence data: Comparing the data quality of iNaturalist and digitized herbarium specimen data in flowering plant families of the southeastern United States (OA)
iNaturalist has the potential to be an extremely rich source of organismal occurrence data. Launched in 2008, it now contains over 150 million uploaded observations as of May 2023. Based on the findings of a limited number of past studies assessing the taxonomic accuracy of participatory science-driven sources of occurrence data such as iNaturalist, there has been concern that some portion of these records might be misidentified in certain taxonomic groups. White et al. compare Research Grade iNaturalist observations with digitized herbarium specimens, both of which are currently available for combined download from large data aggregators and are therefore the primary sources of occurrence data for large-scale biodiversity/biogeography studies.

Harvesting pollen with vibrations: Towards an integrative understanding of the proximate and ultimate reasons for buzz pollination (OA)
In the last 120 years, studies of buzz pollination have contributed to our understanding of the natural history of buzz pollination, and basic properties of the vibrations produced by bees and applied to flowers in model systems. Yet, much remains to be done to establish its adaptive significance and the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of buzz pollination across diverse plant and bee systems. Vallejo-Marin et al. review for bees and plants the proximate (mechanism and ontogeny) and ultimate (adaptive significance and evolution) explanations for buzz pollination, focusing especially on integrating across these levels to synthesise and identify prominent gaps in our knowledge.

Forest restoration and fuels reduction work: Different pathways for achieving success in the Sierra Nevada (OA)
Fire suppression and past selective logging of large trees have fundamentally changed frequent-fire-adapted forests in California. The culmination of these changes produced forests that are vulnerable to catastrophic change by wildfire, drought, and bark beetles, with climate change exacerbating this vulnerability. Management options available to address this problem include mechanical treatments (Mech), prescribed fire (Fire), or combinations of these treatments (Mech + Fire). Stephens et al. quantify changes in forest structure and composition, fuel accumulation, modeled fire behavior, intertree competition, and economics from a 20-year forest restoration study in the northern Sierra Nevada.

Barley MLA3 recognizes the host-specificity effector Pwl2 from Magnaporthe oryzae (OA)
Plant nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLRs) immune receptors directly or indirectly recognize pathogen-secreted effector molecules to initiate plant defense. Recognition of multiple pathogens by a single NLR is rare and usually occurs via monitoring for changes to host proteins; few characterized NLRs have been shown to recognize multiple effectors. The barley (Hordeum vulgare) NLR gene Mildew locus a (Mla) has undergone functional diversification, and the proteins encoded by different Mla alleles recognize host-adapted isolates of barley powdery mildew (Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei [Bgh]). Here, we show that Mla3 also confers resistance to the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae in a dosage-dependent manner.

DNA methylation in the wild: epigenetic transgenerational inheritance can mediate adaptation in clones of wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca) (OA)
Due to the accelerating climate change, it is crucial to understand how plants adapt to rapid environmental changes. Such adaptation may be mediated by epigenetic mechanisms like DNA methylation, which could heritably alter phenotypes without changing the DNA sequence, especially across clonal generations. However, we are still missing robust evidence of the adaptive potential of DNA methylation in wild clonal populations. Sammarco et al. studied genetic, epigenetic and transcriptomic variation of Fragaria vesca, a predominantly clonally reproducing herb.

Decoding plant specialized metabolism: new mechanistic insights ($)
Secondary metabolite (SM) production provides biotic and abiotic stress resistance and enables plants to adapt to the environment. Biosynthesis of these metabolites involves a complex interplay between transcription factors (TFs) and regulatory elements, with emerging evidence suggesting an integral role for chromatin dynamics. Li et al. review key TFs and epigenetic regulators that govern SM biosynthesis in different contexts.

Careers

R & D Botanist, Mississippi
The University of Mississippi is looking for someone to maintain the living collections of plants and grow medicinal plants based on research needs. Identify botanicals/herbs commonly used in dietary supplements. Maintain database, along with repository of authenticated herbal drugs and dietary supplements. Identify plant material used by researchers in the institution for isolation of novel compounds.

Online Instructor - Biology, Louisiana
Baton Rouge Community College (BRCC) seeks to fill the position of Online Instructor - Biology is located in the Division of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. This is a part-time position, and is open for recruitment.

Laboratory Technician in Plant Cell and Molecular Biology, Sheffield
As Laboratory Technician, you will join the BBSRC-funded project “A new model of stomatal function”. This is a collaboration between Sheffield and the John Innes Centre, Norwich. Following our successful creation of insightful computational models for Arabidopsis and grass stomata (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.05.051; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.08.006), we are expanding our analysis to include the wider epidermis, incorporating  real-time quantitation of shape change in guard cells to assay how wall properties of epidermal and guard cells influence stomatal form and function.