This article provides an overview on recent advances in some of the basic signalling mechanisms that participate in a wide variety of stimulus–response pathways. The mechanisms include calcium-based signalling, G-protein-mediated-signalling and signalling involving inositol phospholipids, with discussion on the role of protein kinases and phosphatases interspersed. As a further defining feature...

My Life as a Plant is an activity book targeted toward young children from pre-K through second grade, created with support from the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB). As stated on the back cover, its purpose is “to include even the youngest learners in the society’s vision to help all people see the importance, relevance, and beauty of plants in our daily lives.” While enjoyable, the...

1 Plant Breeding Institute, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany, 2 Plant Breeding Institute, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany, Molecular Cell Physiology, Faculty of Biology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany, Department of Plant Developmental Biology, Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne, Germany, Cluster of Excellence in...

During the last three decades, plant science has focused on model organism-based approaches, particularly on exploiting the powerful system represented by Arabidopsis thaliana, for which there are a wide range of genetic and genomic resources available. Increasingly, however, there is a tendency to broaden analyses to include multiple study organisms in an attempt to understand biological proce...

The role model systems have played in understanding telomere biology has been enormous, and understanding has rapidly transferred to human telomere research. Most work using model organisms to study telomerase and nontelomerase-based telomere-maintenance systems has centered on yeasts, ciliates, and insects. But it is now timely to put considerably more effort into plant models for a number of ...

The plant-pathogen interaction is a multifactor process that may lead to resistance or susceptible responses of plant to pathogens. During the arms race between plant and pathogens, various biochemical, molecular and physiological events are triggered in plant cells such as ROS signaling, hormone activation and gene expression reprogramming. In plants, microRNAs (miRNAs) are key post-transcript...

the Center for Plant Cell Biology, Institute for Integrative Genome Biology and Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside, California, USA. e-mail: [email protected] Although resources devoted to plant biology are modest in comparison to biomedical and other areas of research, plant biologists will play a disproportionate and crucial role in the future of manki...