In the face of an increasing world population and climate instability, the demands for food and fuel will continue to rise. Plant science will be crucial to help meet these exponentially increasing requirements for food and fuel supplies. Fundamental plant research will play a major role in providing key advances in our understanding of basic plant processes that can then flow into practical ad...

Previous studies of plant circadian clock evolution have often relied on models and genes defined in Arabidopsis. These identified homologues with seemingly conserved function, as well frequent gene loss. In the present study, we aimed to identify candidate liverwort Marchantia polymorpha using a more unbiased approach. To rhythm sequenced transcriptomes gemmalings time series constant light co...

Dark-grown transgenic Arabidopsis seedlings expressing the C-terminal domains (CCT) of the cryptochrome (CRY) blue light photoreceptors exhibit features that are normally associated only with light-grown seedlings, indicating that the signaling mechanism of Arabidopsis CRY is mediated through CCT. The phenotypic properties mediated by CCT are remarkably similar to those of the constitutive phot...

A 57-kb region of tomato chromosome 7 harboring five different genes was compared with the sequence of the Arabidopsis genome to search for microsynteny between the genomes of these two species. For all five genes, homologous sequences could be identified in a 30-kb region located on Arabidopsis chromosome 1. Only two inversion events distinguish the arrangement of the five genes in tomato from...

Cadmium (Cd) is a widespread, naturally occurring element present in soil, rock, water, plants and animals. Cd is a non-essential element for plants and is toxic at higher concentrations. Transcript profiles of roots of Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) and Thlaspi caerulescens plants exposed to Cd and zinc (Zn) are examined, with the main aim to determine the differences in gene expression be...

Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) is proving to be an ideal model system for studies of host defense responses to pathogen attack. The Arabidopsis genetic system is significantly more tractable than those of other plant species, and Arabidopsis exhibits all of the major kinds of defense responses described in other plants. A large number of virulent and avirulent bacterial, fungal, and viral p...

The induction of systemic responses in plants is associated with the connectivity between damaged and undamaged leaves, as determined by vascular architecture. Despite the widespread appreciation for studying variation in induced plant defense, few studies have characterized spatial variability of induction in the model species, Arabidopsis thaliana. Here we show that plant architecture generat...

The geometry of leaf margins is an important shape characteristic that distinguishes among different leaf phenotypes. Current definitions of leaf shape are qualitative and do not allow quantification of differences in shape between phenotypes. This is especially true for leaves with some non-trivial three-dimensional (3D) configurations. Here we present a novel geometrical method novel geometri...

Studies on MADS-box genes in Arabidopsis and other higher eudicotyledonous flowering plants have shown that they are key regulators of flower development. Since Arabidopsis and monocotyledonous rice are distantly related plant species it is interesting to investigate whether the floral organ identity factors have been conserved in their functions, and if not, to understand the differences. Arab...

The analytical depth of investigation of the peroxisomal proteome of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana has not yet reached that of other major cellular organelles such as chloroplasts or mitochondria. This is primarily due to the difficulties associated with isolating and obtaining purified samples of peroxisomes from Arabidopsis. So far only a handful of research groups have been successful...