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Photorespiration was long considered a futile cycle leading to a net carbon loss. However, evidence is accumulating that substantial metabolic benefits exist.
Photosynthesis is both an elegantly simple and dazzlingly complex process. The year 2026 marks anniversaries of the discoveries of both of these layers.
The great physicist Niels Bohr is reported to have said that “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”, but that should not stop us trying to guess what 2026 might bring.
The superoxide radical anion is a fundamental reactive oxygen species, with important functions in plant growth, development and stress responses. A search for ‘superoxide anion’ and ‘plant’ in PubMed retrieved 3,327 publications since the year 2000, with 87 of these publications in 2025 through June. Unfortunately, despite the biological ubiquity of the superoxide anion, inconsistent and chemically inaccurate notation widely persists in the plant biological literature. This Comment clarifies the correct notation for the superoxide anion (O2•−), highlights widespread errors and urges standardization to prevent scientific ambiguity.
Georeferencing translates textual location information, for instance, on herbarium specimen labels, into geographical coordinates, but traditional methods are labour intensive and costly. Large language models (LLMs), however, have the potential to facilitate the georeferencing of natural history collections. Under standardized testing, some available LLMs achieved a near-human level of accuracy quickly and affordably, such that their incorporation into current workflows will increase the efficiency of georeferencing.
