Volume 1 Issue 6, June 2015

Consistent with their historical focus on the functional utility of plants, botanical gardens have an important opportunity to help ensure global food and ecosystem security by expanding their living collections, research and education programmes to emphasize agriculture and its impacts.

The Elongator complex promotes MIRNA gene transcription and recruits the microRNA processing machinery for co-transcriptional processing.

One of the world's most important staple crops, the sweet potato, is a naturally transgenic plant that was genetically modified thousands of years ago by a soil bacterium. This surprising discovery may influence the public view of GM crops.

Plant defence against pathogens requires energy, which is provided by photosynthesis. But in addition to this indirect supply role, the photosynthetic light reaction is an active player in fighting off bacteria.

Rubisco catalyses the conversion of atmospheric CO₂ into organic compounds in photosynthesis, and therefore plays a pivotal role in plant metabolism. The complex cellular machineries invovled in the assembly and metabolic repair of this most abundant enzyme are explored in this Review.

The natural variation in an Arabidopsis population contributed to variation in root-associated bacteria. This variation affected the plants’ fitness showing that small host-mediated changes in the microbiome can have large effects on host health.

The balance of beneficial and detrimental effects of nitrogen-fixing plants hinges on the degree to which plants regulate fixation to meet their needs. Legumes show a large diversity of fixation regimes due to differing evolutionary strategies.

Invasive Centaurea solstitialis (yellow starthistle) is larger than in its native range as declines in native competitors make water more available. Such opening of niches may be a factor in the widespread success of invasives.

Transgenic American cotton resistant to lepidopteran pests increases yields and revenues while reducing pesticide use compared to non-GM varieties. However, when grown without artificial irrigation the economic benefits over Asiatic cotton are less clear.

Gibberellin is a major hormone in plant growth. Mixing old-style grafting with modern molecular genetics in Arabidopsis shows that the GA₁₂ precursor is the chemical form of gibberellin undergoing long-distance transport across plant organs.

Innate immunity is the first layer of defence in plants. However, pathogens inject effectors that supress this mechanism. Here the authors show that photosynthesis is a key component of plant defence, and that chloroplasts are targeted by pathogens.

Biogenesis of miRNAs involves the transcription of primary miRNAs and subsequent processing by DCL proteins. Now it is revealed that the Elongator complex couples the two processes by mediating the chromatin association of both primary miRNAs and the protein DCL1.