Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved. An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Plant roots are exposed to a diverse range of soil-dwelling microbial “friends” and “foes.” Here, via single-nucleus RNA-seq, the authors reveal cell type-specific responses to beneficial and pathogen...

This is a two-floor realistic Biological Laboratory building. In this design, I try to tell stories about biologists, introduce biology concepts to general publ…

Premise Stable transformation is the biggest barrier to studying gene function in plants. In most species, transformation requires tissue culture and regeneration methods that may be arduous and cau...

How do we mentor, teach, and do stats when AI can do so much of the work?

Plants produce a remarkable spectrum of specialized metabolites that shape ecological interactions with other organisms and enable environmental adaptation. Deciphering the biosynthesis and function of these metabolites can unlock fundamental resources for crop optimization and synthetic biology platforms to advance the production of food and plant-derived pharmaceuticals and other bioproducts.

Our current carbon economy relies on fossil fuels, from which we isolate small organic molecules to produce medicines, plastics, cosmetic, or other chemicals that we use everyday. However, sustainability requires a more biomass-based carbon economy, where we engineer plants to produce precursor molecules, which can then be assembled to desired chemicals that we use daily. Plants have evolved an amazing diversity of metabolites, but these metabolites are not produced in every cell of the plant. Therefore, it is essential to understand how plants can express different metabolic pathways across different organs, tissues, and even cell types. We are interested in the following questions: How are metabolic pathways (especially specialized metabolism) controlled by cell fate? How can we reprogram plant cell fates for biomanufacturing? How can we toggle between differentiated cell states for metabolic engineering and totipotent cell state for genetic engineering?

Until now, a crucial step in the biosynthesis of iridoids, a class of plant defense substances that are also medically relevant, had remained undiscovered. A team from the Max Planck Institute for Che...

Iridoids are terpenoid metabolites found in thousands of plants. Using single-cell transcriptomics, the authors discovered an unexpected enzyme that has been neofunctionalized to catalyse the cyclization required to form the iridoid scaffold.