A New FronTIR in Targeted Protein Degradation and Plant Development

Three papers, two in a recent issue of Nature and one in the July issue of Developmental Cell, identify a family of F box proteins as the long-sought receptors for the plant growth hormone auxin. The new studies reveal that auxin, a small molecule, regulates F box proteins, which are involved in ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. This finding has profound implications for understanding plant physiology and development and for defining new modes of regulation of SCF ubiquitin ligase complexes

Original Article

本研究の目的は,健康な小児ががんや白血病といった病名からどのようなイメージを抱くのか,自分が大きな病気になったとしたら,病名や治療などについて教えて欲しいと思っているのかを明らかにすることである。千葉県内の小中高校に通っている小学校5年生から高校3年生までの児童生徒1964名から得られたアンケートの回答を,統計ソフトSPSSにて分析を行い以下の結果を得た。1.健康な小児が抱くがんのイメージは,「死ぬ・治らない」「重い・危険・苦しい」といった悲観的なのものが多く,全体の約65%を占めていた。「聞いたことがない・わからない」と答えたものもおり全体の約15%であり,どの学年でも同様の傾向であった。2.健康な小児が抱く白血病のイメージは「病態や特徴について」「原因や治療について」といったものが,全体の約38%を占めていた。「聞いたことがない・わからない」と答えたものは全体の約33%を占め,小学生では半数以上が「聞いたことがない・わからない」と答えていた。3.自分が病気になったときにされる説明については小学生の80%,中学生の85%,高校生の91%が真実を伝えられることを求めていた。その理由として自分の知る権利,治療に前向きに取り組めるといった姿勢の向上,知らないことが不安になる,残された命を有意義に悔いのないように過ごしたいといったものがあげられていた。The purposes of this study were to identify the images of healthy children on cancer and leukemia, and the way of thinking of truth telling with disease. The number of subjects were 1964. They belonged to between the fifth grade of primary school and the third year in high school. They answered someitem-questionnaire, and the answers were analyzed using SPSS. The results were as follows: 1. Sixty-five percent of the images of cancer were pessimistic, like death or incurable and serious or painful . About fifteen percent were having no images. 2. Thirty-eight percent of the images of leukemia were the feature and the cause or the treatment . About thirty-three percent were having no images. 3. Truth telling was desired by eighty percent of students of primary schools, eighty-five percent of junior high schools and ninety-one percent of a high school. The reasons were the rights to know , to be patient with treatments , to become more anxious without truth telling , and to live the remaining days without regrets

Plant Science Decadal Vision 2020–2030: Reimagining the Potential of Plants for a Healthy and Sustainable Future

Plants, and the biological systems around them, are key to the future health of the planet and its inhabitants. The Plant Science Decadal Vision 2020–2030 frames our ability to perform vital and far‐reaching research in plant systems sciences, essential to how we value participants and apply emerging technologies. We outline a comprehensive vision for addressing some of our most pressing global problems through discovery, practical applications, and education. The Decadal Vision was developed by the participants at the Plant Summit 2019, a community event organized by the Plant Science Research Network. The Decadal Vision describes a holistic vision for the next decade of plant science that blends recommendations for research, people, and technology. Going beyond discoveries and applications, we, the plant science community, must implement bold, innovative changes to research cultures and training paradigms in this era of automation, virtualization, and the looming shadow of climate change. Our vision and hopes for the next decade are encapsulated in the phrase reimagining the potential of plants for a healthy and sustainable future. The Decadal Vision recognizes the vital intersection of human and scientific elements and demands an integrated implementation of strategies for research (Goals 1–4), people (Goals 5 and 6), and technology (Goals 7 and 8). This report is intended to help inspire and guide the research community, scientific societies, federal funding agencies, private philanthropies, corporations, educators, entrepreneurs, and early career researchers over the next 10 years. The research encompass experimental and computational approaches to understanding and predicting ecosystem behavior; novel production systems for food, feed, and fiber with greater crop diversity, efficiency, productivity, and resilience that improve ecosystem health; approaches to realize the potential for advances in nutrition, discovery and engineering of plant‐based medicines, and green infrastructure. Launching the Transparent Plant will use experimental and computational approaches to break down the phytobiome into a parts store that supports tinkering and supports query, prediction, and rapid‐response problem solving. Equity, diversity, and inclusion are indispensable cornerstones of realizing our vision. We make recommendations around funding and systems that support customized professional development. Plant systems are frequently taken for granted therefore we make recommendations to improve plant awareness and community science programs to increase understanding of scientific research. We prioritize emerging technologies, focusing on non‐invasive imaging, sensors, and plug‐and‐play portable lab technologies, coupled with enabling computational advances. Plant systems science will benefit from data management and future advances in automation, machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence‐assisted data integration, pattern identification, and decision making. Implementation of this vision will transform plant systems science and ripple outwards through society and across the globe. Beyond deepening our biological understanding, we envision entirely new applications. We further anticipate a wave of diversification of plant systems practitioners while stimulating community engagement, underpinning increasing entrepreneurship. This surge of engagement and knowledge will help satisfy and stoke people\u27s natural curiosity about the future, and their desire to prepare for it, as they seek fuller information about food, health, climate and ecological systems

PIF Genes Mediate the Effect of Sucrose on Seedling Growth Dynamics

As photoautotrophs, plants can use both the form and amount of fixed carbon as a measure of the light environment. In this study, we used a variety of approaches to elucidate the role of exogenous sucrose in modifying seedling growth dynamics. In addition to its known effects on germination, high-resolution temporal analysis revealed that sucrose could extend the number of days plants exhibited rapid hypocotyl elongation, leading to dramatic increases in ultimate seedling height. In addition, sucrose changed the timing of daily growth maxima, demonstrating that diel growth dynamics are more plastic than previously suspected. Sucrose-dependent growth promotion required function of multiple phytochrome-interacting factors (PIFs), and overexpression of PIF5 led to growth dynamics similar to plants exposed to sucrose. Consistent with this result, sucrose was found to increase levels of PIF5 protein. PIFs have well-established roles as integrators of response to light levels, time of day and phytohormone signaling. Our findings strongly suggest that carbon availability can modify the known photomorphogenetic signaling network

The CEP5 Peptide Promotes Abiotic Stress Tolerance, As Revealed by Quantitative Proteomics, and Attenuates the AUX/IAA Equilibrium in Arabidopsis.

Peptides derived from non-functional precursors play important roles in various developmental processes, but also in (a)biotic stress signaling. Our (phospho)proteome-wide analyses of C-TERMINALLY ENCODED PEPTIDE 5 (CEP5)-mediated changes revealed an impact on abiotic stress-related processes. Drought has a dramatic impact on plant growth, development and reproduction, and the plant hormone auxin plays a role in drought responses. Our genetic, physiological, biochemical, and pharmacological results demonstrated that CEP5-mediated signaling is relevant for osmotic and drought stress tolerance in Arabidopsis, and that CEP5 specifically counteracts auxin effects. Specifically, we found that CEP5 signaling stabilizes AUX/IAA transcriptional repressors, suggesting the existence of a novel peptide-dependent control mechanism that tunes auxin signaling. These observations align with the recently described role of AUX/IAAs in stress tolerance and provide a novel role for CEP5 in osmotic and drought stress tolerance

Building a pipeline to identify and engineer constitutive and repressible promoters

To support the increasingly complex circuits needed for plant synthetic biology applications, additional constitutive promoters are essential. Reusing promoter parts can lead to difficulty in cloning, increased heterogeneity between transformants, transgene silencing and trait instability. We have developed a pipeline to identify genes that have stable expression across a wide range of Arabidopsis tissues at different developmental stages and have identified a number of promoters that are well expressed in both transient (Nicotiana benthamiana) and stable (Arabidopsis) transformation assays. We have also introduced two genome-orthogonal gRNA target sites in a subset of the screened promoters, converting them into NOR logic gates. The work here establishes a pipeline to screen for additional constitutive promoters and can form the basis of constructing more complex information processing circuits in the future

Do Trees Grow on Money? Auxin as the Currency of the Cellular Economy

Auxin plays a role in nearly every aspect of a plant's life. Signals from the developmental program, physiological status, and encounters with other organisms all converge on the auxin pathway. The molecular mechanisms facilitating these interactions are diverse; yet, common themes emerge. Auxin can be regulated by modulating rates of biosynthesis, conjugation, and transport, as well as sensitivity of a cell to the auxin signal. In this article, we describe some well-studied examples of auxin's interactions with other pathways