Smoot, a physicist at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting minute temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, a prediction of the Big Bang ...

And the end of civilisation

This study maps chromatin accessibility at single-cell resolution in rice and related grasses, revealing how regulatory DNA elements evolve across cell types and species and identifying potential sile...

Author summary Transposable elements (TEs) are short, self-replicating DNA sequences found in nearly all genomes. While they can be harmful to their hosts, many organisms have evolved defence systems,...

Scientists are tinkering with plant genes to create crops that seed their own clones, with a host of benefits for farmers.

Abstract. This paper empirically examines the impact of university closures on local innovation in South Korea from 2011 to 2021, against the backdrop of d

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.

This study implicates GSL5 inactivation in high, broad-spectrum resistance to the clubroot pathogen Plasmodiophora brassicae in Arabidopsis thaliana, Brassica napus, Brassica oleracea and Brassica rap...

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Editors’ selections from the current scientific literature

Abrupt changes are developing across Antarctica’s ice, ocean and biological systems; some of these changes are intensifying faster than equivalent Arctic changes, potentially irreversibly, and their i...

While famously rainswept, climate crisis, population growth and profligacy mean the once unthinkable could be possible

Our current carbon economy relies on fossil fuels, from which we isolate small organic molecules to produce medicines, plastics, cosmetic, or other chemicals that we use everyday. However, sustainability requires a more biomass-based carbon economy, where we engineer plants to produce precursor molecules, which can then be assembled to desired chemicals that we use daily. Plants have evolved an amazing diversity of metabolites, but these metabolites are not produced in every cell of the plant. Therefore, it is essential to understand how plants can express different metabolic pathways across different organs, tissues, and even cell types. We are interested in the following questions: How are metabolic pathways (especially specialized metabolism) controlled by cell fate? How can we reprogram plant cell fates for biomanufacturing? How can we toggle between differentiated cell states for metabolic engineering and totipotent cell state for genetic engineering?

The Trump administration has asked NASA staffers to draw up plans to end at least two satellite missions that measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to current and former NASA employees.

Circular minichromosomes could be useful tools for plant biotechnology, yet their long-term structural stability, heritability, and effects on phenotype remain poorly understood. In this study, we rep...