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Rice Field

Rice Breeding Breakthrough to Feed Billions

  • by Trishna Sharma

An international team has succeeded in propagating a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95% efficiency. This could lower the cost of hybrid rice seed, making high-yielding, disease resistant rice strains available to low-income farmers worldwide. The work was published Dec. 27 in Nature Communications.

Sprouts

First Complete Structures of Plant Respiratory Proteins

  • by Trishna Sharma

Back-to-back papers in the Dec. 29 issue of Nature Plants report the first complete protein structures for plant respiratory supercomplex I+III₂. Obtaining these structures helps researchers understand basic plant biology, as well as stress responses and how biofuel crops might grow more rapidly.

Poplar Trees

Understanding Growth Regulation by Protein Degradation in Trees for Bioenergy

The U.S. Department of Energy is funding a project at the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences to study the function of genes that regulate growth and wood formation in poplar trees. The three-year, $2.5 million project is led by Nitzan Shabek, assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Biology together with Andrew Groover at the USDA Pacific Southwest Research Station in Davis and Justin Walley, Iowa State University.

Four individuals stand together outside a building, smiling and dressed casually.

Unlocked Enzyme Structure Shows How Strigolactone Hormone Controls Plant Growth

As sessile organisms, plants have to continually adapt their growth and architecture to the ever-changing environment. To do so, plants have evolved distinct molecular mechanisms to sense and respond to the environment and integrate the signals from outside with endogenous developmental programs.

New research from Nitzan Shabek’s laboratory at the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences, published in Nature Plants, unravels the underlying mechanism of protein targeting and destruction in a specific plant hormone signaling pathway.

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Drought Changes Root Microbiome

Drought can have a lasting impact on the community of microbes that live in and around roots of rice plants, a team led by UC Davis researchers has found. Root-associated microbes help plants take up nutrients from the soil, so the finding could help in understanding how rice responds to dry spells and how it can be made more resilient to drought. The work was published July 22 in Nature Plants.

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