Cassava (Manihot esculenta) is an important crop for food security in the tropics, particularly for smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, where yields are often severely limited by pathogen pressure, nutrient deficiency and water scarcity. We expressed a non-rectifying Arabidopsis thaliana potassium (K+) channel gene version, AKT2var, in the vascular tissue of cassava plants...
Over the past 10,000 years, the development of civilization has been enabled by the domestication of plants and animals tailored to human needs. The Triticeae tribe, including barley and wheat, has emerged as one of the most important sources of staple foods worldwide. Here, comparing genomes of wheat and barley genotypes from around the world, we unveiled genomic footprints of...
Plant growth originates from the interlinked action of cell division and cell growth. During radial growth of secondary tissues, bifacial cambial stem cells grow and divide to produce xylem and phloem precursors, which subsequently undergo expansion characteristic of their respective differentiation processes. In Arabidopsis roots, cytokinins and four downstream LATERAL ORGAN...
Cell cycle regulation is well understood in opisthokonts (fungi and metazoans) but not in plants or Apicomplexa, as some cell cycle regulators are not conserved. In opisthokonts, cell cycle progression requires the dephosphorylation of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) by the CDC25 phosphatase. Plants have no CDC25, and thus their mechanisms of cell cycle regulation remain elusive...
Protein neofunctionalization is a key driver of cellular complexity. However, subunits of multimeric protein complexes are often thought to be evolutionarily constrained, limiting their capacity for functional divergence. This presents a paradox in plants, where the Exo70 subunit of the exocyst—an octameric complex essential for exocytosis—has undergone striking expansion and...
To address the urgent biodiversity crisis, it is crucial to understand the nature of plant assemblages. The distribution of plant species is shaped not only by their broad environmental requirements but also by micro-environmental conditions, dispersal limitations, and direct and indirect species interactions. While predicting species composition and habitat type is essential for...
Iridoids are specialized monoterpenes ancestral to asterid flowering plants1,2 that play key roles in defence and are also essential precursors for pharmacologically important alkaloids3,4. The biosynthesis of all iridoids involves the cyclization of the reactive biosynthetic intermediate 8-oxocitronellyl enol. Here, using a variety of approaches including single-nuclei...
Climate change and increasing availability of resources such as carbon dioxide are modifying forest functioning worldwide, but the effects of these changes on forest structure are unclear. As additional resources become available, for example, through CO2 fertilization or nitrogen deposition, large trees, with greater access to light, may be expected to gain further advantages...
Protecting crops from diseases is vital for the sustainable agricultural systems that are needed for food security. Introducing functional resistance genes to enhance the plant immune system is highly effective for disease resistance, but identifying new immune receptors is resource intensive. We observed that functional immune receptors of the nucleotide-binding domain leucine...
Organogenesis relies on the coordination of cell proliferation with developmental programs. In meristems, where new plant organs initiate, the cell proliferation potential depends on stem cell regulators, but the mechanisms linking their local activity with the cell cycle machinery remain unknown. Here we show a positional gradient of G1 duration in the Arabidopsis root meristem...
Guard cell pairs in the leaf epidermis enclose stomata, microscopic pores mediating CO2 uptake and water loss. Historical data suggest that signals from interior mesophyll tissue may modulate guard-cell regulation of stomatal apertures, but the molecular identity of any metabolite-based signals has remained elusive. We discovered that extracellular (apoplastic) fluid from...
Plants have a crucial role in providing essential amino acids for human nutrition. Nine of the 20 proteinogenic amino acids are exclusively synthesized de novo in plastids, yet transporters mediating their exchange across the plastid inner envelope remain unknown. Here we identify RETICULATA1 (RE1) as a plastid-localized transporter for basic amino acids—including Arg, Citr, Orn...
In the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, the synthesis of chloroplast-encoded photosynthetic subunits is feedback regulated by their protein complex assembly state. This regulation is known as control by epistasy of synthesis (CES) and matches subunit synthesis with requirements of complex assembly in photosystem II (PSII), the cytochrome b6f complex (Cyt b6f), photosystem I...
Safeguarding the long-term future of the global coffee supply chain represents a major challenge, particularly in an era of accelerated climate change. Of particular concern are the millions of smallholder farmers across the tropical belt who rely on coffee as their major source of income. The world’s coffee farmers, and thus the global coffee supply chain, rely on two species...
Auxins are plant hormones that direct the growth and development of organisms on the basis of environmental cues. Indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) is the most abundant auxin in most plants. A variety of membrane transport proteins work together to distribute auxins. These include the AUX/LAX protein family that mediate auxin import from the apoplast to the cytosol. Here we use...
The surface-localized receptor kinase FLS2 detects the flg22 epitope from bacterial flagella. FLS2 is conserved across land plants, but bacterial pathogens exhibit polymorphic flg22 epitopes. Most FLS2 homologues possess narrow perception ranges, but four with expanded perception have been identified. Using diversity analyses, AlphaFold modelling and amino acid properties, key...
In the ongoing plant–pathogen arms race, plants use pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) to recognize pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), while in successful pathogens, PAMPs can evolve to evade detection. Engineering PRRs to recognize evading PAMPs could potentially generate broad-spectrum and durable disease resistance. Here we reverse-engineered two natural...