News & Views

Zygote-to-adult lineage tracing in plants has been difficult to achieve. An Arabidopsis lineage map reconstructed by Xia et al. from genome-encoded records and read out at single-cell resolution links genealogy to cell identities and uncovers a generalized ‘three-cell rule’ of branching.

Mitochondrial genes in most crops are inherited maternally. In this issue of Nature Plants, Gonzalez-Duran et al. report that mitochondrial genes can be inherited from both parents.

The false smut fungus attacks rice by secreting a ‘weapon’ that targets a key protein in the plant’s flowers. This single move simultaneously stops the rice from making grains and shuts down its natural immune defences. The discovery of this strategy offers an opportunity to develop disease-resistant rice in the future.

A multilayered pangenomic resource for Sorghum bicolor, integrating an improved reference genome, a representative 33-accession pangenome and a global panel of nearly 2,000 lines, establishes a powerful platform for trait discovery and genetic improvement.

Virus-mediated, heritable, tissue culture-free and transgene-free gene editing is enhanced by an engineered TnpB variant in Nicotiana benthamiana.

Potato is clonally propagated, with a complex genome and a challenging breeding system. Genome-enabled approaches have shed light on the molecular genetic basis of key traits, thereby enabling accelerated breeding strategies and bringing potato in line with other key food crops such as maize and rice that exploit heterosis.

A new winter-rotation oilseed crop has been generated from a freeze-tolerant wild field pennycress by de novo domestication, reducing its glucosinolate and erucic acid contents, as well as its weediness, without a growth and yield penalty. Commercialization has resulted in a low-carbon-intensity intermediate crop, demonstrating a great potential for de novo domestication to create a new crop rotation paradigm for the optimized utilization of agricultural resources.

A genomic analysis reveals how Kalanchoe succulents, known as the ‘mother of thousands’, reinvent propagation. By losing meristem activity regulators, amplifying developmental genes and opening up chromatin, these plants sprout new plantlets from their leaves, with implications for plant totipotency and crop engineering.

The florigen activation complex drives the pivotal transition from vegetative growth to flowering in response to inductive daylengths. Recent work, which incorporates novel components and reveals the multifunctionality of established members of the complex, now uncovers a multi-layered assembly mechanism and an unexpected spatiotemporal distribution of the complex.

Engineering cassava with a modified potassium (K⁺) channel gene from Arabidopsis thaliana enhances K⁺ transport, photosynthesis and storage root yield, offering a sustainable strategy to boost productivity and resilience in nutrient-poor and drought-prone environments.

The apocarotenoid growth regulator zaxinone binds the Arabidopsis strigolactone receptor DWARF 14 (D14). Acting as a long-lasting antagonist, zaxinone interferes with signalling and induces strigolactone biosynthesis. This discovery broadens the ligand repertoire of D14 and raises new questions about hormone crosstalk and receptor plasticity.

Decades of research in plants has established that the protein complexes that transcribe small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are not targeted to DNA in a sequence-specific manner. Two independent studies uncover the recruitment of the key siRNA-producing protein RNA polymerase IV mediated by transcription factors to specific DNA sequences.

Plants often experience multiple stresses to which they adapt by mounting specific responses. Nitrogen supply allows plants to better recover from drought, and this is linked to inhibition of the SnRK2 kinase, which is shown to destabilize the NLP7 master transcription factor for nitrate signals.

Plants produce a remarkable spectrum of specialized metabolites that shape ecological interactions with other organisms and enable environmental adaptation. Deciphering the biosynthesis and function of these metabolites can unlock fundamental resources for crop optimization and synthetic biology platforms to advance the production of food and plant-derived pharmaceuticals and other bioproducts.

Shahzad et al. show that heritable changes in gene body methylation shape phenotypic diversity in Arabidopsis thaliana, adding an epigenetic layer to the evolutionary mechanisms that plants use to adapt to their environment.

A novel approach combines CRISPR-mediated modifications with robotic automation to transform cross-pollination from labour-intensive handwork into a seamless automated process.

When aridity levels exceed a threshold, dryland vegetation productivity decreases dramatically. A new global study shows that high levels of protection within conservation areas enhance the capacity of drylands to withstand more drying, significantly advancing the aridity threshold. This finding highlights the dilemma of global dryland management, that is, whether we should prioritize protection or continue dryland development.

The juxtaposition effect increases meiotic crossover frequency in heterozygous chromosome regions flanked by homozygous regions. Initially discovered in self-fertilizing Arabidopsis, this mechanism also operates in the outcrossing cereal crop maize.

In plants, de novo synthesis of all three basic amino acids (Arg, His and Lys) occurs entirely in the plastid stroma. Therefore, export of these essential primary metabolites via membrane-intrinsic proteins of the plastid envelope is crucial for plant growth, development and fitness.

Two recent studies in phylogenetically distant plants integrate a new layer of control into the canonical auxin pathway. A deeply conserved degron that affects the stability of repressors regulates transcriptional responses and plant development.