Functional genomics could be investigated by over-expressing or silencing a gene sequence towards a better understanding of its biological function at different organisation level (plant cell, tissue, organ or even in the whole plant) in response to various situations (plant developmental stages, environmental stress, plant-pathogen interactions). Actually, several trends are focusing on transi...

Information concerning the sugar status of plant cells is of great importance during a11 stages of the plant life cycle. The availability of or lack of sugars triggers many metabolic and developmental responses, and it is not surprising, therefore, that sugars profoundly affect the expression of a large number of genes (for review, see Koch, 1996; Graham, 1996). Sugar sensing occurs at the leve...

Plant defence often varies by orders of magnitude as plants develop from the seedling to juvenile to mature and senescent stages. Ontogenetic trajectories can involve switches among defence traits, leading to complex shifting phenotypes across plant lifetimes. While considerable research has characterised ontogenetic trajectories for now hundreds of plant species, we still lack a clear understa...

We examined the relationship between meristem allocation and plant size for four annual plant species: Arabidopsis thaliana, Arenaria serphyllifolia, Brassica rapa, and Chaenorrhinum minus. Gradients of light and nutrient availability were used to obtain a range of plant sizes for each of these species. Relative allocation to reproductive, inactive, and growth meristems were used to measure rep...

Bacterial communities associated with roots impact the health and nutrition of the host plant. While a multitude of static factors are known to influence the composition of the root-associated microbiota, the dynamics of these microbial assemblies over the plant life cycle are poorly understood. Here, we use dense temporal sampling of spatial compartments to characterize the root-associated mic...

Bacterial communities associated with roots impact the health and nutrition of the host plant. The dynamics of these microbial assemblies over the plant life cycle are, however, not well understood. Here, we use dense temporal sampling of 1,510 samples from root spatial compartments to characterize the bacterial and archaeal components of the root-associated microbiota of field grown rice (Oryz...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Flooding can occur at any stage of the life cycle of a plant, but often adaptive responses of plants are only studied at a single developmental stage. It may be anticipated that juvenile plants may respond differently from mature plants, as the amount of stored resources may differ and morphological changes can be constrained. Moreover, different water depths may require dif...