The Next Generation of Training for Arabidopsis Researchers: Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biology.

December 2017 d Vol. 175 d No. 4 On the Cover: Fruits, like many vegetative tissues of plants that contribute to human diets, show accelerated decay following the ripening transition. Ripening control therefore has enormous relevance for both plant biology and food security. Tomato is used by researchers across the globe as a model for fruit development and ripening. In this issue, Yang et al. (pp. 1690–1702) identify 11 putative RNA editing factors that are related to tomato fruit ripening. They used virus-induced gene silencing and CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing to show that the RNA editing factor SlORRM4 is involved in ripening. The results demonstrate that SlORRM4 is linked to fruit ripening through its regulation of respiratory rate and ethylene production. SlORRM4 affects mitochondrial transcript editing and core subunit accumulation that are critical for mitochondrial function. Despite the recognized importance of RNA editing in plants, this is one of the few to examine this major posttranscriptional modification in fleshy fruit ripening. The image shows tomato fruit ripening, with the first row in each panel corresponding to normal tomato fruit ripening, and the second and third rows showing ripening of two slorrm4 mutants in cv Micro-Tom. Photo by Yongfang Yang.