March 6, 2023

🌻 The Week in Botany March 6, 2023

It’s a very rapidly put-together issue this week as I’ve spent most of the weekend driving. The result is there’s no careers section this week. It would be nice to think there’ll be more time to work on the newsletter next week, but a lot of deadlines are due between now and Friday. On the plus side, I should have the Sunday free to include the Careers section.

Ideally by this time next week I’d like it to be obvious what some of the work I’ve been tied up with is about. So I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for good news, to be with you at the same time next week. Until then, take care.

Alun Salt (webmaster@botany.one)

On Botany One

The plant that has a nectar menu to prevent unwanted visitors from interfering with pollination
A South American liana creates two different nectars for visitors. A new study finds out why.

Ants can be the heroes of forest regeneration
Human-caused disturbances can affect the ability of animals to help spread seeds, which could reduce the amount of plant diversity in some forests.

Ants can be the villains of conservation
Invasive ants can stop visitors from properly pollinating native plants, damaging their chances of reproduction.

News & Views

Parts of US see earliest spring conditions on record: ‘Climate change playing out in real time’
Parts of Texas, Arkansas, Ohio and Maryland, along with New York, are all recording their earliest spring conditions on record,

David Baker, biochemist: ‘Now we can build completely new proteins to do exactly what we want’
The researcher is one of the creators of deep learning artificial intelligence systems that generate proteins that have never existed in nature, which could usher in a new era for science and medicine.

What gardeners need to know about this flowering phenomenon
Have you ever noticed that certain plants that undergo dormancy flower before leafing out? This phenomenon, known as hysteranthy (hyster = after, anthy = flowering) is evident during late winter and early spring when many fruit trees as well as certain ornamental trees and geophytes (plants that grow from underground storage structures we call bulbs, corms, tubers, and rhizomes) come into bloom. The reasons behind this flower-followed-by-foliage sequence are varied, but all confer distinctive advantages to the plants in question.

How invasive plants crowd out our natives
I’ve discussed the importance of native plants for the survival of our pollinators and birds, but I haven’t really explained why invasives are so damaging to our environment.

In Defense of Plants - Ep. 410 - Phenology is Important
Phenology is defined as "the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life." Far from being a fun topic to investigate, plant phenology is a very important component of how ecosystems operate.

Paul Berg, pioneer in gene splicing who led way for biotech, dies at 96
Paul Berg, a Nobel laureate biochemist whose breakthrough in splicing DNA molecules helped place the foundations for the biotech industry, but who was once so concerned about possible risks from manipulating genes that he asked scientists to allow government oversight, died Feb. 15 at his home on the Stanford University campus in California. He was 96.

Exclusive: Documents raise questions about UCLA’s suspension of ecologist
A committee found that Priyanga Amarasekare broke rules after she alleged discrimination by colleagues. It recommended light sanctions — but the university chancellor issued stronger ones.

Virus infection helps make tomato plants more successful fathers
Dr Alexandra Murphy and her colleagues in the Virology and Molecular Plant Pathology group have discovered that bumblebees can preferentially boost the transfer of male genes in virus-infected tomato plants, which in turn may aid the development of virus-susceptible plant populations.

Better incentives are needed to reward academic software development
Software innovation is critical for integrating, synthesizing and modelling big data in ecology and evolution and increasingly underlies analyses in high-profile research. However, underappreciation of the support needed to create and maintain the software that underpins scientific advances could cause stagnation, lead to insufficient maintenance and stifle innovation.

Genetically modified trees arrive in U.S. forests
A San Francisco biotech company has planted genetically modified poplar trees in Georgia that are designed to suck up more carbon dioxide from the air than regular trees. The company, Living Carbon, intends for these trees to be a large-scale solution to climate change, but this is still early going.

Amanda Cavanagh: RIPE Women's History Month Feature Story
“Empowered.” The word Amanda Cavanagh used to describe how it feels to be a woman in STEM.

Five ways often-unheralded seagrasses boost biodiversity
Seagrasses are one of the most widespread marine ecosystems on Earth, covering around 300,000 km2 of seabed in 159 countries.

Scientific Papers

The consequences of synthetic auxin herbicide on plant–herbivore interactions
Johnson et al. provide a novel framework for studying the effects of herbicide drift on plant–insect interactions, focusing on plant developmental timing, resource quantity, quality, and cues, each of which are crucial to the stability of beneficial weed communities in agroecosystems.

Balancing grain yield trade-offs in ‘Miracle-Wheat’
Abbai et al. investigated if such trade-offs might be a function of source-sink strength by using 385 RILs developed by intercrossing the spike-branching landrace TRI 984 and CIRNO C2008, an elite durum (T. durum L.) cultivar; they were genotyped using the 25K array. Various plant and spike architectural traits, including flag leaf, peduncle and spike senescence rate, were phenotyped under field conditions for two consecutive years. On Chr 5AL, they found a new modifier QTL for spike-branching, branched headt 3 (bht-A3), which was epistatic to the previously known bht-A1 locus.

Proteobacteria Contain Diverse flg22 Epitopes That Elicit Varying Immune Responses in Arabidopsis thaliana
Bacterial flagellin protein is a potent microbe-associated molecular pattern. Immune responses are triggered by a 22-amino-acid epitope derived from flagellin, known as flg22, upon detection by the pattern recognition receptor FLAGELLIN-SENSING2 (FLS2) in multiple plant species. However, increasing evidence suggests that flg22 epitopes of several bacterial species are not universally immunogenic to plants. Cheng et al. investigated whether flg22 immunogenicity systematically differs between classes of the phylum Proteobacteria, using a dataset of 2,470 flg22 sequences.

Efficient gene activation in plants by the MoonTag programmable transcriptional activator
CRISPR/Cas-based transcriptional activators have been developed to induce gene expression in eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. The main advantages of CRISPR-Cas based systems is that they can achieve high levels of transcriptional activation and are very easy to program via pairing between the guide RNA and the DNA target strand. SunTag is a second-generation system that activates transcription by recruiting multiple copies of an activation domain (AD) to its target promoters. SunTag is a strong activator; however, in some species it is difficult to stably express. To overcome this problem, Casas-Mollano et al. designed MoonTag, a new activator that worked on the same basic principle as SunTag, but whose components are better tolerated when stably expressed in transgenic plants.

Engineering of bidirectional, cyanobacteriochrome-based light-inducible dimers (BICYCL)s
Optogenetic tools for controlling protein–protein interactions (PPIs) have been developed from a small number of photosensory modules that respond to a limited selection of wavelengths. Cyanobacteriochrome (CBCR) GAF domain variants respond to an unmatched array of colors; however, their natural molecular mechanisms of action cannot easily be exploited for optogenetic control of PPIs. Jang et al. developed bidirectional, cyanobacteriochrome-based light-inducible dimers (BICYCL)s by engineering synthetic light-dependent interactors for a red/green GAF domain.

Tropical deforestation causes large reductions in observed precipitation
Tropical forests play a critical role in the hydrological cycle and can influence local and regional precipitation. Previous work has assessed the impacts of tropical deforestation on precipitation, but these efforts have been largely limited to case studies. A wider analysis of interactions between deforestation and precipitation—and especially how any such interactions might vary across spatial scales—is lacking. Smith et al. show reduced precipitation over deforested regions across the tropics.

Coastal algal blooms have intensified over the past 20 years
Global spatial and temporal patterns of coastal phytoplankton blooms were characterized using daily satellite imaging between 2003 and 2020. These blooms were identified on the coast of 126 of the 153 ocean-bordering countries examined. The extent and frequency of blooms have increased globally over the past two decades.

A modified aeroponic system for growing small-seeded legumes and other plants to study root systems
The aim of this study is to present step-by-step instructions for fabricating an aeroponic system, also called a “caisson,” that has been in use in several legume research labs studying the development of symbiotic nitrogen fixing nodules, but for which detailed directions are not currently available. The aeroponic system is reusable and is adaptable for many other types of investigations besides root nodulation.

Rescuing Botany: using citizen-science and mobile apps in the classroom and beyond
Chozas et al examine the outcomes of three Bachelor of Science activities as well as two informal education initiatives. We discuss the potential of these approaches as educational and outreach tools. Our results show that citizen science and mobile apps are excellent tools for engaging society in biodiversity conservation and environmental issues.

Sub-continental-scale carbon stocks of individual trees in African drylands
The distribution of dryland trees and their density, cover, size, mass and carbon content are not well known at sub-continental to continental scales. This information is important for ecological protection, carbon accounting, climate mitigation and restoration efforts of dryland ecosystems. We assessed more than 9.9 billion trees derived from more than 300,000 satellite images, covering semi-arid sub-Saharan Africa north of the Equator.

Distinct chromatin signatures in the Arabidopsis male gametophyte
Epigenetic reprogramming in the germline contributes to the erasure of epigenetic inheritance across generations in mammals but remains poorly characterized in plants. Zhu et al. profiled histone modifications throughout Arabidopsis male germline development. We find that the sperm cell has widespread apparent chromatin bivalency, which is established by the acquisition of H3K27me3 or H3K4me3 at pre-existing H3K4me3 or H3K27me3 regions, respectively.

Emerging Roles of Salicylic Acid in Plant Saline Stress Tolerance
Yang et al. reviewed the impact of SA on saline stress responses and the associated molecular pathways, as well as recent studies toward understanding the hubs and crosstalk between SA-induced tolerances to biotic and saline stress. They propose that elucidating the mechanism of the SA-specific response to various stresses, as well as SA-induced rhizosphere-specific microbiome modeling, may provide more insights and support in coping with plant saline stress.