Thomas Greb

How meristems shape plant architecture in cereals—Cereal Stem Cell Systems (CSCS) Consortium (Thomas Dresselhaus , Martina Balboni , Lea Berg , Anika Dolata , Frank Hochholdinger , et al) doi.org/10.1093/plce... #PlantScience

Chapeau! This is simply beautiful.

Plants monitor the integrity of their barrier by sensing gas diffusion - Nature A study using Arabidopsis shows that plants can monitor the integrity of their outer barriers by sensing gas diffusion, enabling them to initiate wound repair to prevent water loss and pathogen entry.

How plants sense injury in their barrier tissue, periderm? Painstakingly detailed and amazing work by post doc Hiroyuki Iida shows that wounding is sensed by the diffusion of two gases: ethylene and oxygen. @treebiocoe.bsky.social‬ @erc.europa.eu‬ 1/x 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Scheme of meristem development in maize embryos, highlighting the expression domains of key regulatory genes.

The Cereal Stem Cell Systems Consortium published a comprehensive review in Plant Cell on how meristems shape cereal architecture.
If you are not a fan of cereals except for breakfast, your teaching will still benefit from the amazing figures!
‪@cerealcell.bsky.social‬
tinyurl.com/32a74xpd

Starting the scientific program of #ICAR2025 with an amazing keynote by Jane Parker @parkergroup.bsky.social on the structural basis of plant immunity! Looking forward to 5 days of fantastic Arabidopsis and plant science at the #Bijlokesite in Ghent!

Vascular Development meeting

Kick off Vascular Development satellite meeting by @bertderybel.bsky.social. #icar2025

Warming up to #ICAR2025 🌱with two days of cool vascular science at our Vascular Development satellite meeting at @psb-vib.bsky.social.

The GreenRobust cluster of Excellence is now live on Bluesky @greenrobust.de
Follow to be informed of the great things coming up 🌱

Really, you better make sure that this ends smoothly!

Thanks! A good day for plant sciences.

Congratulations!

Since today, the GreenRobust Cluster of excellence is indeed alive: greenrobust.de! Pure joy in light of this team achievement!

Wonderful collaboration with the Wolf, Greb and Prevedel labs!

Thus, collectively, we think that the SL signaling pathway is one tool by which plants can modulate their water transport capacity to withstand water deficiency conditions.

Lastly, we saw that drought-induced reduction of vessel element size is hardly happening in SL signaling-deficient mutants and that, thus, drought-induced adjustments of vessel elements is SL-dependent.

As a new direction (at least for us) we then tested the effect of altered vessel formation on water loss and found that more vessels are correlated with enhanced transpiration and that this was not caused by other effects like altered stomata density.

The effect of SL signaling on auxin-related genes seems to be the crucial point here as those genes are clearly over-represented among the SL target genes and elimination of some of the auxin-dependent xylem regulators eliminated enhanced vessel formation in SL signaling deficient mutants.

When identifying SL signaling-dependent genes specifically in radially growing organs, we saw that those genes show changed expression in vascular cells types in the SL receptor mutant d14, suggesting that transcriptional profiles in vascular tissues depend on SL signaling.

Then, we saw that in SL signaling-deficient plants cell type composition is indeed shifted toward vessel elements. This was based on SL signaling in the vasculature and not seen in related signaling mutants and not in mutants with similar branching phenotypes like found in SL deficient mutants.

Thereby, we discovered that SL signaling is differential in radially growing organs with signaling levels being particularly low in cambium stem cells and in developing vessel elements.

After having established a nucleus-based method for performing single cell RNA sequencing, we checked whether our data would be helpful to reveal the role of strigolactone signaling in radial plant growth.

Strigolactones optimise plant water usage by modulating vessel formation - Nature Communications Vessel elements arise from cambium stem cells and support plant growth by supplying water and nutrients. This study reveals that strigolactone signalling inhibits vessel formation in response to droug...

Our study on the effect of strigolactone signaling on vessel formation and water usage is now peer reviewed: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Great achievement of Jiao Zhao, Dongbo Shi, Kiara Kaeufer, and everybody involved!

Re-analysis of mobile mRNA datasets raises questions about the extent of long-distance mRNA communication - Nature Plants This study reveals that a substantial number of transcripts that are currently annotated as graft-mobile lack statistical support from available RNA-seq data.

If you would like to understand how difficult it is to annotate mobile mRNAs using SNPS read this.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Consider important suggestions/controls: homografts & heterografts, use barcoded reads, minimise RT-PCRs, have a reliable annotated/high quality genome sequence .. etc

Front cover of a postcard to promote an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany titled "Molecular Coding of Specificity in plant Processes". The issue will be edited by Julien Gronnier, Ruth Großeholz, Klaus Harter and Laura Ragni. The image depicts the logo of CRC 1101 “Molecular Encoding of Specificity in Plant Processes“ - carried by groups of 3 German Universities and funded by the DFG, deals with the challenge of understanding specificity in plant processes by application of methods reaching from structure determination, high-end spectromicroscopy and biochemistry over forward and reverse genetics to big data science and computational modelling. This special issue will summarize some recent advances made by CRC 1101 members but also welcomes contributions from colleagues working in this research area.

**UPCOMING SPECIAL ISSUE**

Molecular Coding of Specificity in Plant Processes

Editors: Julien Gronnier, Ruth Großeholz, Klaus Harter & @lauraragni.bsky.social

Deadline: 30th Sept '25

Manuscripts welcomed, please contact us (bit.ly/JXBissues)

#JXBspecialissues 🌱 🌿 🧪 #plantscience

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Fantastic to see that @pascalhunziker.bsky.social, postdoc in the lab, is on his way to initiate his own research line with the help of the @klaus-tschira-stiftung.de: Exploring the potential of mashua as a sustainable staple food crop.
www.cos.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research-...

The dynamic and diverse nature of parenchyma cells in the Arabidopsis root during secondary growth - Nature Plants A combination of lineage tracing and single-cell RNA sequencing reveals how xylem and phloem parenchyma cells in the secondary tissue of Arabidopsis root mature gradually. Upon root barrier injury, th...

It's out! Detailed transcriptome atlas of mature Arabidopsis root undergoing secondary growth. Fantastic work by Munan Lyu and Hiroyuki Iida + other lab members, wonderful collab with @bertderybel.bsky.social lab on the scRNAseq analysis. @treebiocoe.bsky.social 1/x www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are excited to welcome Gilles Storelli as a new full professor at COS. Gilles' topic is physiology and symbiosis targeting the role of the microbiome of the fly gut in shaping organismal physiology.

Join us in Ghent on June 14-15 for two days of Plant Vascular Development! A satellite meeting of ICAR2025. More info and registration at web.cvent.com/event/448810... .
Spread the word! #PlantScience @bertderybel.bsky.social @apmahonen.bsky.social

JOB OPPORTUNITY: Join us as a scientific programmer to advance tools for multi-omics data at Heidelberg University. Details can be found at shorturl.at/OcnOa and please spread the word!

We are proud to announce the Vascular Development 2025 meeting as a satellite to the ICAR2025 in Ghent this summer! All info via icar2025.com