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There is growing recognition that artificial light at night has wide-ranging effects on plants and animals, including disruption of nocturnal pollination. Here, Giavi et al. show that artificial light at night can also alter the daytime interactions between plants and pollinators.

Living plant collections hold an immense wealth of plant diversity and have critical educational, scientific and conservation roles. This Perspective examines current data management practices of living collections and advocates for higher data standards and a robust and inclusive global data ecosystem.

Climate and land-use changes will redistribute fire across the planet. Larger, more frequent, and intense wildfires are projected in extra-tropical regions, while human-driven declines in fire activity are reversed under the highest degrees of warming.

Pangenomic and epidemiological analyses reveal a genetic shift in U.S. Salmonella Hadar populations during 2019–20, driven by expansion of a lineage carrying a prophage-like element that likely arose in commercial poultry and spread to backyard flocks.

Combining high-resolution mapping of foliar and herbivore faecal sodium concentrations across Africa, the authors show that plant-derived sodium availability constrains megaherbivore densities at a continental scale.

Using systematic satellite observations of land surface temperature and soil moisture during soil dry-downs, the spatially-explicit global distribution of the critical soil moisture threshold of plant water stress and its drivers is uncovered.

Authors discuss the potential of conserving crop wild relatives, together with the associated communities of microorganisms, to unlock strategies for improving crop resilience and achieving food security.

Plant biosynthetic enzymes rapidly evolve to catalyze specialized reactions. Here, the authors present the crystal structure and mechanism of COSY, the enzyme involved in coumarin biosynthesis of the BAHD-acyltransferase family that catalyzes an intramolecular acyl transfer reaction through a proton exchange mechanism.

Using trait-based optimality theory that unifies stomatal responses and acclimation of plants to changing environments, this study builds a model of the coupling of CO₂ and water vapour exchanges through the leaves. This successfully predicts the simultaneous decline in carbon assimilation, stomatal conductance and photosynthetic capacity during progressive droughts.

Phenomic and genomic approaches are required to evaluate the progress of breeding strategies. Here, the authors analyse 65 years of genetic progress in maize, showing that breeders have selected traits with stable effects on yield whereas not for adaptive traits key for climate change adaptation.

The authors found that the key elements of plant form and function, analysed at global scale, are largely concentrated into a two-dimensional plane indexed by the size of whole plants and organs on the one hand, and the construction costs for photosynthetic leaf area, on the other.

Elevated atmospheric CO₂ has stimulated plant growth, yet the future land carbon sink may be constrained in part by nutrient availability. Here the authors review plant nutrient acquisition strategies and the need for better representation in models to improve predictions of land carbon uptake.

Machine-learning algorithms trained on 25,000 geolocated soil samples are used to create high-resolution global maps of mycorrhizal fungi, revealing that less than 10% of their biodiversity hotspots are in protected areas.

Soil priming could release large amounts of soil C into the atmosphere. Here the authors show that experimental warming boosts soil priming and CO₂ emissions in grasslands potentially due to microbial changes. Model accuracy could be improved by incorporating these mechanisms.

Colin Norman, recently at Barnwell, reports on the reprocessing debate in the United States

Torrens-Spence et al. reveal how plants in the cabbage family uniquely accelerate production of salicylic acid, a key defense hormone, through evolution of a specialized enzyme called EPS1. This finding could help enhance disease resistance in other crops.

The fraction of C4 plants in terrestrial biomass decreased from 16% to 12% between 1982 and 2016, but the change is too small to explain the observed change in the isotopic composition of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to estimates based on a C3/C4 distribution model and a carbon cycle box model.

Elevated CO₂ increases plant biomass, providing a negative feedback on global warming. Nutrient availability was found to drive the magnitude of this effect for the majority of vegetation globally, and analyses indicated that CO₂ will continue to fertilize plant growth in the next century.

The efficiency with which plants use carbon assimilated through photosynthesis has a key role in determining natureʼs capacity to offset carbon dioxide emissions. This study leverages global eddy covariance observations and ecological theory to reveal the patterns of vegetation carbon use efficiency worldwide.

Stem rust is an important disease of wheat and resistance present in some cultivars can be suppressed by the SuSr-D1 locus. Here the authors show that SuSr-D1 encodes a subunit of the Mediator Complex and that nonsense mutations are sufficient to abolish suppression and confer stem rust resistance.

The authors investigate the response of Archaea to experimental warming in a tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Warming was linked to reduced diversity and convergent succession, with further links to changed ecosystem function. Stochastic processes dominated community changes but decreased over time.

Halogenated plant natural products are rare and plant halogenation enzymes are thus far unknown. Here Kim et al. identify a dechloroacutumine halogenase from Common Moonseed that catalyzes the final chlorination step in the biosynthesis of acutumine, a chloroalkaloid with selective cytotoxicity to cultured T cells.

Remotely sensed NDVI data and contemporary field data from 84 grasslands on 6 continents show increasing divergence in aboveground plant biomass between sites in different bioclimatic regions.

Sampling the viromes of vertebrates, arthropods and plants on an island ecosystem shows that viral transmission between species is strongly affected by phylogeny but less affected by predator–prey relationships and that generalist viruses pose the greatest zoonotic risk.

Soil microbial diversity and composition is thought to play a major role in elemental cycling. Here, the authors analyse a large dataset of soil microbiome and carbon data from European forests and find that soil fungal community composition is a strong predictor of carbon storage.

A year-long experiment in a wet tropical forest found that 4 ^oC of warming boosted soil CO₂ emissions by 42-204%. These high rates suggest tropical soils may release more carbon under future warming than climate models predict.

Grass pea is a multi-stress tolerant orphan crop and developing cultivars with decreased accumulation of the neurotoxin β-L-oxalyl-2,3-diaminopropionic acid (β-L-ODAP) is one of its breeding objectives. Here, the authors assemble its genome and reveal genes involved in the biosynthesis of β-L-ODAP.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

Colin Norman looks at a new analysis of population trends throughout the world which has produced findings that are both encouraging and decidedly grim

The first mammalian lipoxygenase crystal structure reveals the surprising presence of an N-terminal β-barrel domain that is highly similar to the C-terminal domain of pancreatic Upases. The non-haem iron-containing catalytic domain is a compact version of the soybean lipoxygenase-1 major domain.

An international team of researchers finds high potential for improving climate projections by a more comprehensive treatment of largely ignored Arctic vegetation types, underscoring the importance of Arctic energy exchange measuring stations.

Understanding patterns in woody plant trait relationships and trade-offs is challenging. Here, by applying machine learning and data imputation methods to a global database of georeferenced trait measurements, the authors unravel key relationships in tree functional traits at the global scale.

In confined environments, such as soil and the gut, flow constrains the spatial organization of bacterial communities, impacting their ecological success. Here, the authors reveal that in a community of mixed motile and non-motile Escherichia coli in channels under Poiseuille flow, the motile bacteria induce segregation of non-motile cells, leading to asymmetric biofilm formation, with implications for understanding bacterial colonization dynamics.

A family of enzymes—coronafacic acid ligases, involved in the synthesis of bacterial phytotoxins—are found to catalyse amide bond formation with a wide range of substrates.

Analyses of 2,658 whole genomes across 38 types of cancer identify the contribution of non-coding point mutations and structural variants to driving cancer.