Trends in Plant Science最新文献

Conservation programs for plant species with extremely small populations (PSESP) have been successfully implemented for several decades in China. Here we highlight how their inclusion in several national conservation policies helps meet targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) and show how lessons from these programs can be applied more widely.

In a recent study, Zeng et al. uncovered 3β-tigloyloxytropane synthase (TS) in Atropa belladonna, characterizing its mitochondrial localization and substrate specificity. The discovery of this enzyme opens up new bioengineering possibilities for tropane alkaloids (TAs), enhancing the potential for sustainable agriculture and expanding our knowledge of TA biosynthesis.

Lateral root (LR) formation, that is vital for plant development, is one of many auxin-modulated processes, but the underlying regulatory mechanism is not yet fully known. Recently, González-García et al. discovered the BiAux compound and showed that it is involved in LR development via regulating specific auxin coreceptors.

Monitoring plant physiological information for gaining a comprehensive understanding of plant growth and stress responses contributes to safeguarding plant health. Light-emitting probes – in terms of small-molecule, nanomaterials-based, and genetically protein-based probes – can be introduced into plants through foliar and root treatment or genetic transformation. These probes offer exciting opportunities for sensitive and in situ monitoring of dynamic plant chemical information – for example, reactive oxygen species (ROS), calcium ions, phytohormones – with spatiotemporal resolution. In this review we explore the sensing mechanisms of these light-emitting probes and their applications in monitoring various chemical information in plants in situ. These probes can be used as part of a sentinel plant approach to provide stress warning in the field or to explore plant signaling pathways.

The intricate regulation of flowering time in response to day length has been extensively shown. A recent study has now revealed a similar mechanism for regulating vegetative growth. Wang et al. observed that plants measure daylength as the duration of photosynthesis and metabolite production to modulate vegetative growth.

The year 2023 was the warmest year since 1850. Greenhouse gases, including CO₂ and methane, played a significant role in increasing global warming. Among these gases, methane has a 25-fold greater impact on global warming than CO₂. Methane is emitted during rice cultivation by a group of rice rhizosphere microbes, termed methanogens, in low oxygen (hypoxic) conditions. To reduce methane emissions, it is crucial to decrease the methane production capacity of methanogens through water and fertilizer management, breeding of new rice cultivars, regulating root exudation, and manipulating rhizosphere microbiota. In this opinion article we review the recent developments in hypoxia ecology and methane emission mitigation and propose potential solutions based on the manipulation of microbiota and methanogens for the mitigation of methane emissions.

Plant-microbe symbioses require intense interaction and genetic coordination to successfully establish in specific cell types of the host and symbiont. Traditional RNA-seq methodologies lack the cellular resolution to fully capture these complexities, but single-cell and spatial transcriptomics (ST) are now allowing scientists to probe symbiotic interactions at an unprecedented level of detail. Here, we discuss the advantages that novel spatial and single-cell transcriptomic technologies provide in studying plant-microbe endosymbioses and highlight key recent studies. Finally, we consider the remaining limitations of applying these approaches to symbiosis research, which are mainly related to the simultaneous capture of both plant and microbial transcripts within the same cells.

Cultivated tomatoes exhibit cleistogamy – self-pollination within closed flowers. Wu et al. report that three HD-Zip IV genes and Style2.1 coordinately control anther trichome formation and style length to form closed anther cones that underpin the development of cleistogamy. Further exploration of causal variation and regulatory elements could provide targets for plant breeding.