November 13, 2023

🌻 The Week in Botany November 13, 2023

It’s a quick Week in Botany this week, as I’ve been rushed off my feet. I got to Friday evening and then fell asleep with exhaustion and I’m not sure I’ve woken up properly yet.

It was Diwali this weekend, so it feel like holiday season has started. At the moment December 25 and January 1 are set to be days off, but there might have to be an extra week off around that period. I don’t know when yet, so if there is something you want mentioned in the newsletter, contacting me earlier than later is the best plan.

There’s also a new wave of COVID going around. I still haven’t caught it, but I keep thinking it can’t be long before it catches me. Assuming it doesn’t, there’ll be another newsletter with you at the same time next week. Until then, take care.

Alun (webmaster@botany.one)

On Botany One

Increasing yield prediction accuracy
Researchers find combining multiple types of models improves crop yield predictions, outperforming single models.

Harmonizing global water stress research
Plants use and lose water through a process called evapotranspiration, which varies considerably across biomes due to a diverse set of factors. Understanding the intricacies of evapotranspiration is pivotal in a climate change scenario, especially in the context of rising drought events worldwide.

How Serapias Orchids Outsmart Self-Pollination
Scientists reveal how Serapias orchids ensure their cross-pollination through a special flower morphology interacting with pollinators in a particular manner, without the need for pollen masses changes as in many other orchids.

News & Views

Planting a billion trees in 10 years: Macron's risky promise for French forests
The French president's commitment is worrying specialists, who believe that it focuses solely on numbers, at the expense of protecting biodiversity.

Saving Europe’s Wetlands: The Key To Carbon Storage
From the Balmoral royal estate in the Scottish highlands to bogs of the Biebrza valley in northeast Poland, and from the frozen peatlands of northern Finland to the Rhine delta in the Netherlands, many of Europe’s degraded wet places are leaking carbon dioxide into the atmosphere on a huge scale. We must call a halt.

Kenya declares a public holiday for national campaign to plant 15 billion trees
The Kenyan government says Nov. 13 will be a public holiday to allow citizens time to plant trees as part of its ambitious plan to grow 15 billion new trees by 2032.

If You Plant Milkweed, They Will Come. (And Not Just the Butterflies.)
These underappreciated plants attract a “hungry throng” of beneficial insects. They’re not bad to look at, either.

Kaikōura children help to create ‘pocket forest’
Students at Kaikōura Suburban School have been planting trees and gardens around the school and have partnered with Environment Canterbury to support planting on local farms.

Firm using AI to map trees from space in bid to save tropical forests
Space Intelligence chief executive Dr Murray Collins said it is important to develop ‘sophisticated technology’ in the fight against climate change.

Scientists show how to turn lunar soil fertile for agriculture
If humankind is ever to establish long-term bases on the moon, there will be a need for a regular source of food. It is not practical, however, to think you can plant corn or wheat in plain lunar soil in greenhouses on the moon and expect a bumper crop - or any crop at all.

Can trees save the climate? Experts say ‘smart’ forestry is one place to start.
By sustainably cutting trees, the New England Forestry Foundation believes it can make more productive forests.

Back to the future with native tree gardens
Have you ever thought of how a garden would look years after you had planted the seeds and saplings?

Ancient Europe was half covered by savannah and grazed by elephants
It is widely assumed that Europe used to be covered by dense, unbroken forests, but ancient pollen shows half was grassland or light woodland

Subscribe now

Scientific Papers

The plant immune receptor SNC1 monitors helper NLRs targeted by a bacterial effector ($)
Plants deploy intracellular receptors to counteract pathogen effectors that suppress cell-surface-receptor-mediated immunity. To what extent pathogens manipulate intracellular receptor-mediated immunity, and how plants tackle such manipulation, remains unknown. Arabidopsis thaliana encodes three similar ADR1 class helper nucleotide-binding domain leucine-rich repeat receptors (ADR1, ADR1-L1, and ADR1-L2), which are crucial in plant immunity initiated by intracellular receptors. Wang et al. report that Pseudomonas syringae effector AvrPtoB suppresses ADR1-L1- and ADR1-L2-mediated cell death.

Repression of pattern-triggered immune responses by hypoxia (OA)
Understanding how plants regulate the crosstalk between stress response pathways is key to our efforts to increase crop resilience and mitigate yield losses caused by global climate change. Despite the urgency to do so, relatively little remains known about how plants respond to combined stresses, which frequently occur in nature. Moponey et al. show that the hypoxia response program and the basal layer of plant immunity (pattern-triggered immunity or PTI) share components.

Stomatal closure in maize is mediated by subsidiary cells and the PAN2 receptor ($)
Liu et al. compared stomatal gas exchange and stomatal aperture dynamics in wild-type and pan1, pan2, and pan1;pan2 Zea mays (L.) (maize) mutants, which have varying percentages of aberrantly formed subsidiary cells. Stomata with 1 or 2 defective subsidiary cells cannot close properly, indicating that subsidiary cells are essential for stomatal function.

TurboID-based proximity labeling accelerates discovery of neighboring proteins in plants ($)
Identification of protein–protein interactions (PPIs) and protein compartmentalization is of great value for understanding cellular processes. Conventional affinity purification-mass spectrometry has low efficiency in detecting weak and/or transient PPIs. TurboID-based proximity labeling (PL) has emerged as an efficient tool that overcomes these weaknesses for identifying PPIs directly in the cellular environment.

Botanical memory: five centuries of floristic changes revealed by a Renaissance herbarium (Ulisse Aldrovandi, 1551–1586) (OA)
Buldrini et al. analysed the spatially explicit floristic information available in the herbarium of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1551–1586) to track floristic changes in the surroundings of Bologna across five centuries. Aldrovandi's data were compared with the Flora della Provincia di Bologna by Girolamo Cocconi (1883) and the Floristic Database of Emilia-Romagna (1965–2021). They explored potential variations in native range and life forms composition, and habitat affinity of the species in the three floras, also contrasting between native and alien species.

Delayed development of basal spikelets in wheat explains their increased floret abortion and rudimentary nature (OA)
Backhaus et al. investigated the underlying causes of basal spikelet abortion using shading applications in the field. They found that basal spikelet abortion is likely to be the consequence of complete floret abortion, as both occur concurrently and have the same response to shading treatments.

Gibberellin Perception Sensors 1 and 2 reveal cellular GA dynamics articulated by COP1 and GA20ox1 that are necessary but not sufficient to pattern hypocotyl cell elongation (OA)
The phytohormone gibberellin (GA) is critical for environmentally sensitive plant development including germination, skotomorphogenesis and flowering. The FRET biosensor GIBBERELLIN PERCEPTION SENSOR1, which permits single-cell GA measurements in vivo, was previously used to observe a GA gradient correlated with cell length in dark-grown but not light-grown hypocotyls. Griffiths et al. sought to understand how light signalling integrates into cellular GA regulation.

Revising the global biogeography of annual and perennial plants ($)
There are two main life cycles in plants—annual and perennial. These life cycles are associated with different traits that determine ecosystem function. Although life cycles are textbook examples of plant adaptation to different environments, we lack comprehensive knowledge regarding their global distributional patterns. Poppenwimer et al. assembled an extensive database of plant life cycle assignments of 235,000 plant species coupled with millions of georeferenced datapoints to map the worldwide biogeography of these plant species.

Plant cell wall patterning and expansion mediated by protein-peptide-polysaccharide interaction ($)
Plant cells are surrounded by a polysaccharide cell wall that withstands internal cellular pressure but adapts and restructures as the cell expands. In growing pollen tubes, the proteins RALF4 and LRX8 are required to monitor integrity of the cell wall. Moussu et al. demonstrated that these proteins form a complex with pectic polysaccharides, the gel-like component of the cell wall.

Bryo-FIGHTs: Emerging insights and principles acquired from non-vascular plant-pathogen interactions (OA)
Jeong et al. outline the idea that core molecular aspects impacting plant infection and immunity are likely conserved across land plants. They discuss recent advances in the emerging field of Evo-MPMI (evolutionary molecular plant-microbe interactions) and highlight future opportunities that will clarify our understanding of the evolutionary framework that underpins host-pathogen interactions across the full spectrum of plant evolution.

Paternal imprinting in Marchantia polymorpha (OA)
Recently, it was shown that the entire paternal genome is repressed during the diploid phase of the life cycle of the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha. The deposition of the repressive epigenetic mark H3K27me3 on the male pronucleus is responsible for the imprinted state, which is reset by the end of meiosis. Montgomery & Berger put these recent reports in perspective of other forms of imprinting and discuss the potential mechanisms of imprinting in bryophytes and the causes of its evolution.

In planta expression of human polyQ-expanded huntingtin fragment reveals mechanisms to prevent disease-related protein aggregation (OA)
In humans, aggregation of polyglutamine repeat (polyQ) proteins causes disorders such as Huntington’s disease. Although plants express hundreds of polyQ-containing proteins, no pathologies arising from polyQ aggregation have been reported. To investigate this phenomenon, Llamas et al. expressed an aggregation-prone fragment of human huntingtin (HTT) with an expanded polyQ stretch (Q69) in Arabidopsis thaliana plants.

Careers

Assistant Professor (Tenure Track): Plant Light Signaling, Wageningen
The Laboratory of Molecular Biology is actively seeking an enthusiastic Assistant Professor with a profound interest in plant molecular biology, light signalling and developmental biology. This is a Tenure Track position established within the framework of national Sector Plan Biology, where we aim to create an academic community that connects research at different levels of biological organization to understand dynamics and variation of biological systems. This tenure track position intends to specifically strengthen research on the building blocks of life.

PhD in Plant Volatile Interactions, Bern
We look for an enthusiastic and ambitious PhD student with a strong interest in plant environment interactions. Applicants should have a firm background in one or more of the following fields: molecular biology, biochemistry, plant physiology, analytical chemistry, entomology, and ecology. All our projects are highly integrative and require a willingness to embrace multiple biological disciplines. Fluency in English is a prerequisite for this position. A MSc Degree or Diploma with competitive grades is required.

Professor, Plant Biology, Melbourne
The appointee will be a world expert in molecular plant phenotyping, including knowledge of computer vision-based phenotyping of crops in controlled environments. Having knowledge of plant physiology and development would be advantageous. They will be expected to provide guidance in the disciplinary field and foster excellence in research, research policy and research training within the institution, discipline and/or profession and within the scholarly and general community.

PhD, Understanding how damaged photosystem proteins are replaced, Norwich
This exciting project will employ a variety of cutting-edge methods. Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) will be employed to visualise the structure of gene expression complexes. Biophysical methods, such as surface plasmon resonance (SPR), will be used to measure molecular interactions of proteins with other proteins and with RNA. The molecular pathway of PSII repair will be explored using coimmunoprecipitation and proteomic analyses. Genetic manipulation of plants will be performed to test the hypotheses that arise. These discoveries will support the long-term effort to better control photosynthetic output and timing for improved crops and biotechnologies. They will also shed new light on fundamental biological questions of how genes are read.

Postdoctoral Fellow - Laboratory of Dr. Lena Mueller, California
The Mueller lab is looking for several postdoctoral candidates to understand the molecular signaling mechanisms that control an intimate relationship between plants and beneficial soil fungi, arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis. Plants benefit from interacting with AM fungi by increased mineral nutrient uptake, whereas fungi obtain carbon products from their plant hosts. We apply a combination of molecular biology, genetics, advanced microscopy, and -omics approaches to understand how plant hosts control symbiosis in a changing environment.

PhD researchers on 'Genotype-specific development of potato plants under combined stress factors' at CropXR, Wageningen
Do you want to be part of the development of resilient crops that require fewer environmentally-damaging inputs? Then you could be the ideal candidate to join our new, interdisciplinary research institute CropXR! This vacancy is for three 5-year 0.8 fte PhD positions, focusing on resilience of potato to environmental stress. The project involves field experiments to study genotype-specific development under combined stress factors.