Plant ecologists and evolutionary biologists frequently examine patterns of phenotypic variation across variable environments or genetic identities. Too often, we ignore the fact that most phenotypic traits change throughout growth and development of individual plants, and that rates of growth and development are highly variable. Plants growing in different environments are likely to grow at di...

Although large amounts of genomic and full-length cDNA sequence data from plants are now publicly available, knowledge of the promoters and transcription start sites (TSSs) in plants is still limited compared to mammals, such as human and mouse. In a recent paper, a prominent GC-compositional strand bias or GC-skew (=(C-G)/(C+G)), where C and G denote the numbers of cytosine and guanine residue...