Plant organ development and polarity establishment is mediated by the action of several transcription factors. Among these, the KANADI (KAN) subclade of the GARP protein family plays important roles in polarity-associated processes during embryo, shoot and root patterning. In this study, we have identified a set of potential direct target genes of KAN1 through a combination of chromatin immunop...

Shoot branching requires the establishment of new meristems harboring stem cells; this phenomenon raises questions about the precise regulation of meristematic fate. In seed plants, these new meristems initiate in leaf axils to enable lateral shoot branching. Using live-cell imaging of leaf axil cells, we show that the initiation of axillary meristems requires a meristematic cell population con...

Light is a major environmental factor required for stomatal opening. Blue light (BL) induces stomatal opening in higher plants as a signal under the photosynthetic active radiation. The stomatal BL response is not present in the fern species of Polypodiopsida. The acquisition of a stomatal BL response might provide competitive advantages in both the uptake of CO2 and prevention of water loss wi...

Novel species of microfungi described in the present study include the following from Australia: Bagadiella victoriae and Bagadiella koalae on Eucalyptus spp., Catenulostroma eucalyptorum on Eucalyptus laevopinea, Cercospora eremochloae on Eremochloa bimaculata, Devriesia queenslandica on Scaevola taccada, Diaporthe musigena on Musa sp., Diaporthe acaciigena on Acacia retinodes, Leptoxyphium ku...

Cotton is an economically important crop, essential for the agriculture and textile industries. Through integrating transcriptomic data, we discovered that multi-dimensional co-expression network analysis was powerful for predicting cotton gene functions and functional modules. Here, the recently available transcriptomic data on Gossypium arboreum, including data on multiple growth stages of ti...

We have used cultured ventral mesencephalic and cerebellar granule cells to test the toxicity of extracts of cycad seeds (genus Cycas) and cycad-derived flours traditionally prepared in Guam. There was no significant difference in the toxicity of extracts prepared from the female gametophyte tissue of C. circinalis, C. revoluta, and C. media, common wheat flour, and 13 of 17 cycad flour samples...

Leaves are determinate organs that arise from the flanks of the shoot apical meristem as polar structures with distinct adaxial (dorsal) and abaxial (ventral) sides. Opposing regulatory interactions between genes specifying adaxial or abaxial fates function to maintain dorsoventral polarity. One component of this regulatory network is the Myb-domain transcription factor gene ASYMMETRIC LEAVES1 ...

DORNROSCHEN (DRN) (also known as ENHANCER OF SHOOT REGENERATION1; ESR1) and DRN-LIKE (DRNL; also known as ESR2) are two linked paralogues encoding AP2 domain-containing proteins. drn mutants show embryo cell patterning defects and, similarly to drnl mutants, disrupt cotyledon development at incomplete penetrance. drn drnl double mutants with weak or strong drnl alleles show more highly penetran...

Most multicellular organisms have a capacity to regenerate tissue after wounding. Few, however, have the ability to regenerate an entire new body from adult tissue. Induction of new shoot meristems from cultured root explants is a widely used, but poorly understood, process in which apical plant tissues are regenerated from adult somatic tissue through the de novo formation of shoot meristems. ...

Auxin has long been known as a critical phytohormone that regulates fruit development in plants. However, due to the lack of an enlarged ovary wall in the model plants Arabidopsis and rice, the molecular regulatory mechanisms of fruit division and enlargement remain unclear. In this study, we performed small RNA sequencing and degradome sequencing analyses to systematically explore post-transcr...