New Phytologist最新文献

• Considering the alarming prospect of at least two in five plant species facing extinction, it is urgent to identify unsecured phylogenetic branches within the plant Tree of Life and adopt appropriate conservation strategies. While conventional seed banking has the potential to safeguard a large part of world's flora, the scarcity of phylogenetically informed ex situ conservation programmes poses a challenge to effective plant conservation.
• Leveraging an extensive dataset of seed collections across 109 European seed banks, our study reveals that current collections capture a phylogenetically diverse subset of the European flora. However, they safeguard between 43.29% and 66.40% of the maximum possible phylogenetic diversity, suggesting that specific major branches of the plant phylogeny in Europe remain unprotected.
• To address this gap, we introduce a novel quasi-deterministic method to generate a list of unbanked species, prioritized by evolutionary significance. Although this approach can enhance the evolutionary quality of seed bank collections, biological, technical and practical constraints may limit conventional seed banking for some of these priority species.
• We advocate for an enhanced coordination among conservation facilities and the integration of phylogenetic perspectives with advancements in ex situ conservation techniques beyond conventional seed banking, to effectively conserve plant evolutionary heritage.

• Anthracnose, caused by Colletotrichum gloeosporioides, is a significant fungal disease that affects poplar trees globally, leading to reduced yields and substantial economic losses. Proanthocyanidins (PAs) play a key role in resistance to fungal pathogens; however, the mechanisms by which PAs mediate resistance to anthracnose in poplar remain poorly understood.
• In this study, we identified PopbZIP2, a transcription factor-encoding gene that was initially expressed in infected leaves and subsequently in uninfected leaves in response to C. gloeosporioides infection. As a transcriptional activator, PopbZIP2 can bind to the promoters of target genes PopGRF3 and PopAPA1, increasing proanthocyanidin levels in cells to enhance defense against pathogens. It is noteworthy that the PopAPA1 protein can directly inhibit pathogen growth.
• We further demonstrated that PopMYB4 can interact with PopbZIP2, reducing its promoter binding activity and thereby inhibiting the expression of PopGRF3 and PopAPA1. Overexpression of PopMYB4 led to sensitivity to the pathogen C. gloeosporiodes. Under normal conditions, the soluble and insoluble proanthocyanidin contents in PopMYB4 transgenic plants were significantly lower compared to the control.
• The dual regulation of immune responses by the PopMYB4-PopbZIP2 module unveils a novel regulatory mechanism in Populus, enhancing our understanding of the complex networks governing immune responses.

• Our knowledge of how the parental genomes interact to shape hybrid performance remains limited.
• This work established four hybrid maize populations and evaluated plant height (PH) in both the parental and hybrid populations, generating an extensive transcriptome and translatome dataset. We conducted a genome-wide association study, expression quantitative trait locus (eQTLs) mapping, transcriptome-wide association mapping (TWAS), and allele-specific expression analysis to elucidate the regulatory mechanisms underlying PH variation in hybrids.
• QTLs, eQTLs, and TWAS-associated genes (TAGs) exhibited both distinct variations and conserved patterns between the maternal and hybrid populations. The functional route (FR)-following QTLs demonstrated significant nonadditive effects on PH and expression traits. The intergenomic interactions of eQTLs in the heterozygous state drive the nonadditive regulation of eQTL-regulated genes (eGenes), resulting in the transformation of eGenes into TAGs and eQTLs into nonadditive QTLs for PH. This regulatory mechanism is further supported by the nonadditive regulation of phytohormone-related genes. Additionally, nonadditive TAGs and QTLs are implicated in regulating nonadditive translation.
• This study elucidates how nonadditive QTLs contribute to phenotypic variation in hybrid maize, offering a fresh perspective on the understanding of plant heterosis.

• Nutrient acquisition, conservation and recycling are three mechanisms for plants to meet their nutritional requirements. However, how nutrient recycling relates to other mechanisms remains unknown. Here, we hypothesize that nutrient resorption processes are coordinated with plant nutrient-acquisition strategies.
• We measured leaf and root nutrient resorption efficiencies and proficiencies and root economic traits for 34 coexisting ectomycorrhizal (ECM) and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) temperate woody species.
• Our results revealed that species with lower foraging efficiency relying on mycorrhizal fungi for nutrient absorption (e.g. larger root diameter) have higher root phosphorus resorption efficiency and greater phosphorus concentrations of senesced roots, while species with conservative nutrient-acquisition strategies (e.g. higher root tissue density) have lower nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations of senesced leaves and roots.
• Overall, our results demonstrate that plant nutrient acquisition and protection strategies are partly coordinated with plants' ability to resorb nutrients. First, they suggest that outsourcing phosphorus acquisition to mycorrhiza may limit the value for plants to reduce phosphorus loss. Second, those species better able to protect their living leaves and roots from adversity are not necessarily the most efficient to recycle nutrients, but are nonetheless the most capable of minimizing nutrient loss during organ senescence.

What inspired your interest in plant science?

From a young age, I enjoyed spending time in and around trees and forests. I always liked being in the three-dimensional space created by forests and looking up to see what all the individual tree canopies were doing, how they were organised, and how they differed from each other. I was lucky to have parents who appreciated hiking and camping and being in the outdoors. Growing up in Idaho, USA, we often visited the conifer forests of the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountains. After completing an undergraduate degree in biology, I wanted to take the general background that I had learned and focus more on forest ecosystem science, which eventually led me to tree physiology. When I started to learn about the important role that forests play in the earth system, and how they contribute to the global carbon cycle, it cemented my desire to understand more about their functioning and how their behaviour could change in response to human activities.