October 3, 2022

🌻 TWiB October 3, 2022

It's another quick write-up this week. I still don't have COVID, but I do have a chest infection that's making sleep difficult. I have now got the knack of sleeping upright in an armchair.

The good news is that I seem to be improving, so I should be paying a little more attention to Twitter next week. I'm always paranoid when I have to rely on the automated systems to see what's going on. Unless I'm wrong about getting better, another email of the stories being shared on Twitter should be with you at the same time next week.

Until then, take care.

Alun (webmaster@botany.one)

In Botany One

Modelling pollen competition — botany.one Identification of traits affecting pollen performance

Warming wasps pollinate poorly — botany.one As temperatures rise, the life span of a crucial pollinator diminishes to the extent it may not be able to do its job.

Seed distribution by birds can be too much of a good thing — botany.one Ecologists find that while birds can scatter seeds, sometimes they take their treasures too far to aid a plant.

Improving crop modeling using machine learning — botany.one Integration of machine learning and crop modelling can optimize predictions of plant growth and yield.

News & Views

Autumn has arrived in the UK – but the season is not like it used to be There’s a new season’s beauty in the Fens, but also signs of altered behaviour by flora and fauna stressed by the milder weather

Keeping up with the plant killers — kamounlab.medium.com I gave this talk in 2020, the International Year of Plant Health, to discuss the pathogens that infect our crop plants. You can see that this talk dates to April 2020 — so, while we were all thinking about a viral pandemic, other pandemics, pandemics of plant diseases, were threatening our crops. Here, I start with a brief illustration of the power of plant pathogens to re-shape plant development, then explore how other plant killers affect the crops we depend on for our survival and how plants protect themselves against these killers.

Soil’s Microbial Market Shows the Ruthless Side of Forests — www.quantamagazine.org In the “underground economy” for soil nutrients, fungi strike hard bargains and punish plants that won’t meet their price.

Can disease resistance evolve independently at different ages? — jecologyblog.com Our paper in this issue of Journal of Ecology explores genetic variation in age-specific resistance to a sterilizing infectious disease in three wild plant species. A common pattern in animals and plants alike is that disease resistance increases with age. In agriculture, breeding for such ‘mature plant resistance’ can be a useful tool in disease control. Yet we know very little about how and why age-specificity in resistance evolves.

More than half of the world's palm trees in danger — www.bbc.co.uk More than a thousand species of palm tree are at risk of extinction, according to a study.

Virus discovered in world’s most widely used research plant — www.uu.nl A previously unknown virus has been found to occur worldwide in the most widely studied plant species, thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana). The presence of the virus, which was discovered by researchers at Utrecht University and Wageningen University & Research, potentially has far-reaching implications for research projects.

Hemiepiphytic figs reduce phosphorus competition by killing host trees — globalplantcouncil.org Host-killing by hemiepiphytes is an endemic phenomenon in the tropics. Many fig species—keystone plants in tropical forests—have evolved the hemiepiphytic ecotype. However, the benefits and adaptive strategies of their special life history remain poorly understood. 

Over 1,700 environment activists killed in decade — www.bbc.co.uk An environmental activist has been killed every two days on average over the past decade, a new study shows.

Necrosis and ethylene-inducing-like peptide patterns from crop pathogens in seven brassicaceous species – a Plant Pathology highlight — www.bspp.org.uk When we say ‘eat your greens’, we are mostly talking about sprouts, cabbages and kale. We know these vegetables are good for us, even if they are not our favourite!

Scientific Papers

Anther Development – The Long Road to Making Pollen

Historically, recovery of male-sterile mutants has been the starting point for studying anther biology. Many genes and some genetic pathways have well-defined functions in orchestrating subsequent cell fate and differentiation events. Today, new tools are providing more detailed information; for example, the developmental trajectory of germinal cells illustrates the power of single cell RNA-seq to dissect the complex journey of one cell type. Marchant and Walbot highlight ambiguities and gaps in available data to encourage attention on important unresolved issues.

Polycomb-mediated repression of paternal chromosomes maintains haploid dosage in diploid embryos of Marchantia

Complex mechanisms regulate gene dosage throughout eukaryotic life cycles. Mechanisms controlling gene dosage have been extensively studied in animals, however it is unknown how generalizable these mechanisms are to diverse eukaryotes. Montgomery et al. use the haploid plant Marchantia polymorpha to assess gene dosage control in its short-lived diploid embryo.

Genetic architecture underlying variation in floral meristem termination in Aquilegia — academic.oup.com

Floral organs are produced by floral meristems (FMs), which harbor stem cells in their centers. Since each flower only has a finite number of organs, the stem cell activity of an FM will always terminate at a specific time point, a process termed floral meristem termination (FMT). Min et al. explored potential candidate genes under each QTL and characterized novel expression patterns of select loci of interest using in situ hybridization. To their knowledge, this is the first attempt to dissect the genetic basis of how natural variation in the timing of FMT is regulated, and their results provide insight into how floral morphological diversity can be generated at the meristematic level.

Abscisic Acid Modulates Neighbor Proximity-Induced Leaf Hyponasty in Arabidopsis

Michaud et al. show that low red to far red ratio leads to a rapid increase in ABA levels in leaves. Changes in ABA levels depend on PIFs, which regulate the expression of genes encoding isoforms of the enzyme catalyzing a rate-limiting step in ABA biosynthesis.

A wheat resistosome defines common principles of immune receptor channels — www.nature.com

Förderer et al. report the cryo-electron microscopy structure of the wheat CNL Sr355 in complex with the effector AvrSr356 of the wheat stem rust pathogen. Direct effector binding to the leucine-rich repeats of Sr35 results in the formation of a pentameric Sr35–AvrSr35 complex, which we term the Sr35 resistosome. Wheat Sr35 and Arabidopsis ZAR1 resistosomes bear striking structural similarities, including an arginine cluster in the leucine-rich repeats domain not previously recognized as conserved, which co-occurs and forms intramolecular interactions with the 'EDVID' motif in the coiled-coil domain.

Is auxin enough? Cytokinins and margin patterning in simple leaves — www.cell.com

Navarro-Cartagena and Micol discuss evidence supporting the hypothesis that cytokinins play a role in simple leaf margin morphogenesis via crosstalk with auxin, as occurs in other plant developmental events. Indeed, mutant or transgenic arabidopsis plants defective in cytokinin biosynthesis or signaling, or with increased cytokinin degradation have leaf margins less serrated than the wild type.

Structural basis for the activity regulation of a potassium channel AKT1 from Arabidopsis — www.nature.com

The voltage-gated potassium channel AKT1 is responsible for primary K+ uptake in Arabidopsis roots. AKT1 is functionally activated through phosphorylation and negatively regulated by a potassium channel α-subunit AtKC1. However, the molecular basis for the modulation mechanism remains unclear. Lu et al. report the structures of AKT1, phosphorylated-AKT1, a constitutively-active variant, and AKT1-AtKC1 complex.

Animal, Fungi, and Plant Genome Sequences Harbor Different Non-Canonical Splice Sites — www.mdpi.com

Most protein-encoding genes in eukaryotes contain introns, which are interwoven with exons. Introns need to be removed from initial transcripts in order to generate the final messenger RNA (mRNA), which can be translated into an amino acid sequence. Precise excision of introns by the spliceosome requires conserved dinucleotides, which mark the splice sites. However, there are variations of the highly conserved combination of GT at the 5′ end and AG at the 3′ end of an intron in the genome. GC-AG and AT-AC are two major non-canonical splice site combinations, which have been known for years. Recently, various minor non-canonical splice site combinations were detected with numerous dinucleotide permutations. Frey and Pucker expand systematic investigations of non-canonical splice site combinations in plants across eukaryotes by analyzing fungal and animal genome sequences.

Induction of Defense Responses and Protection of Almond Plants Against Xylella fastidiosa by Endotherapy with a Bifunctional Peptide

Xylella fastidiosa is a plant pathogenic bacterium that has been introduced in the European Union (EU), causing significant yield losses in economically important Mediterranean crops. Almond leaf scorch (ALS) is currently one of the most relevant diseases observed in Spain, and no cure has been found to be effective for this disease. Priming plants with BP178 induced defense responses mainly through the salicylic acid pathway, but also overexpressed some genes of the jasmonic acid and ethylene pathways. It is concluded that the bifunctional peptide is a promising candidate to be further developed to manage ALS caused by X. fastidiosa.

Divergent evolutionary trajectories of bryophytes and tracheophytes from a complex common ancestor of land plants — www.nature.com

The origin of plants and their colonization of land fundamentally transformed the terrestrial environment. Harris et al. elucidate the basis of this formative episode in Earth history through patterns of lineage, gene and genome evolution. They use new fossil calibrations, a relative clade age calibration (informed by horizontal gene transfer) and new phylogenomic methods for mapping gene family origins

Careers

Postdoctoral Researcher The Dean group works on gene regulatory mechanisms linking co-transcriptional processing, transcription and chromatin. The post-docs in the lab work closely together to elucidate mechanisms whereby non-coding transcription impacts sense transcriptional output via epigenetic switches. We focus on one particular gene Arabidopsis FLC, but work closely with collaborators to see if our findings are generic across the genome.

Assistant Professor, Evolutionary Biology - Winston Salem, NC job with Wake Forest University The Wake Forest University Department of Biology invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Biology who studies biodiversity and evolution of multicellular organisms in natural systems over long time scales. Areas of research could include phenotypic or genetic character evolution, evolutionary change within a focal lineage, and broader comparative patterns of change among lineages. We hope to enhance our department’s expertise in plant, animal, and fungal systems, and in related tools such as comparative methods, phylogenetic analysis, and digital morphometric analysis.

New York Botanical Garden is looking for Assistant/Associate/Full Curator. NYBG is seeking Biologists and Data Scientists with interdisciplinary experience in biodiversity informatics, data science, systematics, evolutionary biology, genomics (including but not limited to functional, population or conservation), ecology (including agroecology or restoration ecology), remote sensing, machine learning, ethnobotany, forestry, conservation (including species, population or ecosystem), or biogeochemistry (including carbon studies).

Assistant/Associate/Full Professor Tenure System The Department of Plant Biology, jointly with the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Horticulture, and Plant, Soil, and Microbial Sciences at Michigan State University invites applications from outstanding candidates for an open-rank position in the broad area of plant developmental biology. With our desire to further diversify our community, we particularly encourage candidates from underrepresented groups to apply. 

Senior Editor - Functional Ecology We are seeking an ecologist who is highly motivated in advancing the publication of papers that enable a mechanistic understanding of ecological pattern and process to join the team of Editors on Functional Ecology.

Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology — recruit.ucdavis.edu The Department of Plant Pathology in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Davis is recruiting an Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology with an emphasis in plant virology. This is an academic year (9-month), tenure track Assistant Professor position, with responsibilities for research, teaching, mentoring and service, that includes an appointment in the California Agricultural Experiment Station (AES).

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