How leaf temperature deviates from air temperature informs species’ thermoregulation strategies. This meta-analysis-based Review presents a global picture of thermoregulation behaviours and the implications for plants’ responses to thermal stress.

This study decodes gapless genomes for three water lily species, discovering genetic keys to fertilization, floral colour and scent, and offering a molecular roadmap for how early flowering plants evolved and conquered the planet.

A high-quality bread wheat genome reveals that prioritized selection on variable gluten genes and enhanced epistatic interactions drove the adaptive evolution of wheat end-use quality, offering a blueprint for future breeding.

Omics analyses are now a ubiquitous first step in the search for condition-specific events such as differentially expressed genes, often relying on Venn diagrams to highlight unique responses. In stress experiments, for instance, the presence of differentially expressed genes exclusive to combined stresses is frequently interpreted as evidence of non-additive effects: the effect of combined stresses is different from the sum of the effect of single stresses. Using a multi-stress dataset with 22 replicates, we here argue that this reasoning is likely to be false because of the inherently low statistical power of most studies, which use only a few (often three) biological replicates. While it is well known that low statistical power reduces sensitivity, its detrimental impact on specificity has been largely overlooked. We emphasize the need for careful interpretation of any claim of specificity, regardless of the number of replicates, and plead for improved experimental design and statistical modelling to avoid misleading biological interpretations.

This study reveals a mechanism by which plants control mitochondrial quality during seedling emergence. The authors identify the protein SPL2, which tags damaged mitochondria for degradation, thereby ensuring sufficient energy for the seedling to break through the soil. This finding provides new insights into early plant development.

The timescales on which plants operate are both much shorter and much longer than those on which we function. All we can observe are the traces they leave behind.

Seeds are the basis of agriculture. Arabidopsis seeds are a key model for plant reproduction. To establish a high-resolution atlas of seed gene expression, Martin et al. profiled early Arabidopsis seed development using single-nucleus RNA sequencing.

In a manner distinct from their light-activated canonical roles, non-photoexcited photoreceptors can also exert biological functions in darkness, suggesting unexpected complexity in photon-mediated signalling.

Root-knot nematodes secrete a class of RGF-like effectors that promote feeding cell formation and facilitate parasitism by mimicking endogenous plant RGFs and co-opting the host RGI-receptor-mediated developmental signalling pathway.

Using cryo-electron tomography, the authors reveal how plasmodesmata (plant cytoplasmic bridges) are gated by cell wall remodelling and how helical protein assemblies scaffold internal membranes, with potential implications for molecular filtering.