Plants, Volume 3, Issue 1

An increase of cytosolic Ca²⁺ is generated by diverse physiological stimuli and stresses, including pathogen attack. Plants have evolved two branches of the immune system to defend against pathogen infections. The primary innate immune response is tr...

Light regulates the expression and function of aquaporins, which are involved in water and solute transport. In Arabidopsis thaliana, mRNA levels of one of the aquaporin genes, TIP2;2, increase during dark adaptation and decrease under far-red light...

Jasmonates (JA) are lipid-derived plant hormones. They have been shown to be important regulators of photomorphogenesis, a developmental program in plants, which is activated by light through different red and blue light sensitive photoreceptors. In...

Nitrite plays an important role in the nitrogen metabolism of most cells, including Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We have shown that vegetative cells of C. reinhardtii are attracted by nitrite. The Nia1nit2 mutant with defects in genes encoding the nitr...

Calcium-permeable channels underpin elevations of free calcium that encode specific signals in stress adaptation, development and immunity. Identifying the genes encoding these channels remains a central goal of plant signalling research. Evidence n...

The editors of Plants would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2013. [...]

Indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) synthesis is required for grain-fill in maize and appears to be regulated by cell-wall invertase (CWIN) activity. OsYUC12 is one of three IAA biosynthesis genes we previously reported as expressed during early rice grain de...

The phytohormone auxin is one of the main directors of plant growth and development. In higher plants, auxin is generated in apical plant parts and transported from cell-to-cell in a polar fashion. Auxin is present in all plant phyla, and the existen...

Flavin-based photoreceptor proteins of the LOV (Light, Oxygen, and Voltage) and BLUF (Blue Light sensing Using Flavins) superfamilies are ubiquitous among the three life domains and are essential blue-light sensing systems, not only in plants and alg...

One challenge in studying the second messenger inositol(1,4,5)-trisphosphate (InsP₃) is that it is present in very low amounts and increases only transiently in response to stimuli. To identify events downstream of InsP₃, we generated transgenic plan...

In our previous report, an 80% ethanol bitter gourd seed extract (BGSE) was found to suppress proliferation of adult T-cell leukemia (ATL) cell lines. The present study aimed to identify the bioactive compounds from BGSE specific against ATL. From th...

Leaf morphology is one of the most variable, yet inheritable, traits in the plant kingdom. How plants develop a variety of forms and shapes is a major biological question. Here, we discuss some recent progress in understanding the development of comp...