Villins, which were originally named after their occurrence in mammalian microvilli, contain a gelsolin domain and a C-terminal villin headpiece domain. Both domains can bind actin; one villin molecule can therefore bind to two actin filaments, which enables it to function in actin bundling. This is in contrast to the related gelsolin, which has only a calcium-dependent actin-severing function. In

Among the vast diversity of plants, we often focus our admiration, conservation efforts and research on vascular plants: the towering trees, flowering shrubs, and beneficial grasses and herbs. However, this emphasis reveals a bias that leaves the non-vascular plants — the tiny, overlooked, inconspicuous plants — hidden in the shadows, literally. These ‘lower plants’, as the research community likes

On 24 May 2024, the World Intellectual Property Organization adopted the Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (hereafter, the Treaty). Although it has been hailed as a victory for Indigenous peoples and local communities1,2, its effectiveness will depend on how the Treaty is implemented in national law. The cornerstone of the Treaty is the requirement

December is traditionally a time for looking back at the year that has passed. For plant biology, drought has been a frequently raised topic in 2024 — and 2025 is unlikely to be any different.

Disturbance is a natural and frequent part of the life cycle of an ecosystem. In forests, discrete events such as fires, flooding and landslides can cause the sudden death of groups of trees, which leads to total stand replacement. These disruptions — and the size, shape and spatial arrangement of the patch left behind — have long-lasting effects on forest structure and composition. In a study published

Symmetric cell divisions are boring; they only maintain or expand an existing tissue. The more interesting asymmetric divisions give rise to novel cell types with diverging fates. Two examples during Arabidopsis development have attracted the attention of researchers over the years. The first one marks the entry into the stomatal lineage, when the meristemoid mother cell divides to produce, at the

Using recombinant inbred lines developed by crossing two maize inbred lines with different KDRs, the researchers identified a large-effect quantitative trait locus, qKDR1. A 1,417-bp sequence of this locus is causal because its knockout slows KDR. Different alleles at this locus correspond to different KDRs and differential expression of a nearby RPG (qKDR1 REGULATED PEPTIDE GENE) gene. RPG has a high

Born of Fire and Rain: A Journey into America’s Temperate Rainforest M. L. HerringYALE UNIVERSITY PRESS: 2025. 280 pp. £25.00 When imagining the ancient, slumbering trees of the Pacific Northwest, we could be forgiven for thinking that this temperate rainforest was exactly that: temperate. But its mild climate belies an ecosystem familiar with the extreme.

CRYs possess a conserved photolyase-homologous region and a divergent C-terminal domain. The photolyase-homologous region binds flavin adenine dinucleotide, which is responsible for light activation. Blue-light-activated phosphorylation leads to a conformational change that exposes a short motif of 80 residues and enables dimerization. Dimerized light-activated CRYs are known to bind various target

The functions of many genes in model plants are unknown. Traditional methods to infer function are showing their limitations, but other approaches are emerging.

Many LACs are regulated by copper-miRNAs (Cu-miRNAs), which target genes encoding copper-containing proteins. LACs are required for lignification and flavonoid synthesis in plants and have been associated with plant development and stress tolerance. So, the researchers investigated the effects on stress tolerance of manipulating Cu-miRNAs. Specifically, they chose three Cu-miRNAs (miR397, miR408 and

Half of all plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds. This biotic dispersal allows plants to maintain gene flow between fragmented populations, recover from perturbation and expand their distribution ranges — responses that underlie the capacity of plants to track new habitats with climate change. Therefore, declining animal populations, which are both a consequence and a driver of global change

One of the most apparent responses to nitrogen starvation is leaf yellowing due to starvation-induced senescence. Most leaf nitrogen is found in chloroplasts, so degradation of chloroplast components can free up much of these nitrogen reserves to be transported to sink tissues and support root growth, thereby enhancing foraging for new resources. A key transcription factor that regulates nitrogen-starvation-induced

With an increasing ability to understand the complexity of living systems, it becomes more and more evident that well-defined canonical functions of proteins and complexes are intertwined.

The development of high-yielding, resilient cultivars is the primary goal of many crop breeding programmes, but the uptake of these new cultivars is persistently low in low-income countries. We discuss constraints related to the adoption of crop cultivars and stress the importance of participatory approaches in building trust and promoting the adoption of new technologies.

As with other biological processes, genetics can be used to disrupt and then understand these mechanisms. Assessing shapes carefully and quantitatively leads to the identification of mutants that have less-regular organs, displaying higher phenotypical variability. One of the organs that is now used as a model for this type of research is the tiny sepal that is produced during flower development in