Plant cells are totipotent, meaning individual cells have the potential to develop into a full organism, a property unique to the zygote for animals. However, in most species for most cells, plant cells are not spontaneously totipotent, since they must be treated with specific hormone combinations to unlock their totipotency. Species within the Kalanchoe genus is unique as they spontaneously develop foliar embryos that are fully realized plantlets with shoot and root from notches along the edges of leaves. We speculate that the progenitor cells that give rise to these foliar embryos are totipotent, and we are using single cell techniques to identify & characterize them. In addition to being a fundamental process for plant biology, we foresee unlocking totipotency has many biotechnological applications, such as faciliating genetic transformation and the development of synthetic organs of biomanufacturing.

Protein evolution is influenced by historical contingencies and functional constraints, but their combined impact on rapidly diversifying pathogen virulence effectors remains poorly understood. Here, ...

Nucleosomes are thought to be structural barriers to transcription, establishing a restrictive ground state that must be destabilized for gene express…

Background Because transposable elements (TEs) can cause heritable genetic changes, past work on TE mobility in Arabidopsis thaliana has mostly focused on new TE insertions in the germline of hypometh...

Carrillo-Carrasco and colleagues highlight the importance of the establishment of streptophyte algal model systems and the community efforts towards this goal.

Interview with Hassan Salem, who studies beetles and their microbial partners at the Max Planck Institute for Biology.

Interview with Omaya Dudin, who uses Ichthyosporea as models to study how and why unicellular organisms evolved multicellularity at the University of Geneva.