Plants, like all organisms don’t like an excess of salt. One of its ways to deal with salt stress is to strengthen their cell walls. FER, a receptor in the cell membrane is one of the key proteins in regulating this. Now a group of Chinese researchers show that key to this is the small molecule phosphatidic acid.
Category Archives: Paper highlight
Bending due to gravity
Place a plant on its side and its roots and shoots quickly grow down and up again. The plant sensed that the direction of gravity changed and adjusted its growth accordingly. But how plants regulate this temporary adjustment was not exactly known. Now a group of international researchers show that one part of the answer is the temporarily activating the auxin response factor ARF19.
Turning red
Plants are wonderful chemical factories. So when synthetic food dyes get banned it is only logical to look for plant produced alternatives, like betalain which is naturally produced by beetroots and their relatives. A new study by American researchers explores the possibility of getting other plant species to produce betalain.
Switching from 2D into 3D
Life as we know it happens in 3D. So, when a group of international researchers found a gene that appears to have a role in the transition from 2D into 3D development they where excited.
Plant en Zo 