A Ca-sensor switch for tolerance to elevated salt stress in Arabidopsis.

Excessive Na in soils inhibits plant growth. Here, we report that Na stress triggers primary calcium signals specifically in a cell group within the root differentiation zone, thus forming a "sodium-sensing niche" in Arabidopsis. The amplitude of this primary calcium signal and the speed of the resulting Ca wave dose-dependently increase with rising Na concentrations, thus providing quantitative information about the stress intensity encountered.

Improving plant drought tolerance and growth under water limitation through combinatorial engineering of signalling networks.

Agriculture is by far the biggest water consumer on our planet, accounting for 70 per cent of all freshwater withdrawals. Climate change and a growing world population increase pressure on agriculture to use water more efficiently ('more crop per drop'). Water-use efficiency (WUE) and drought tolerance of crops are complex traits that are determined by many physiological processes whose interplay is not well understood.

Knockout of the plastid RNase E leads to defective RNA processing and chloroplast ribosome deficiency.

Ribonuclease E (RNase E) represents a key enzyme in bacterial RNA metabolism. It plays multifarious roles in RNA processing and also initiates degradation of mRNA by endonucleolytic cleavage. Plastids (chloroplasts) are derived from formerly free-living bacteria and have largely retained eubacterial gene expression mechanisms.

High-level expression of human immunodeficiency virus antigens from the tobacco and tomato plastid genomes.

Transgene expression from the plant's plastid genome represents a promising strategy in molecular farming because of the plastid's potential to accumulate foreign proteins to high levels and the increased biosafety provided by the maternal mode of organelle inheritance. In this article, we explore the potential of transplastomic plants to produce human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) antigens as potential components of an acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) vaccine. It is shown that the HIV antigens p24 (the major target of T-cell-mediated immune responses in HIV-positive individuals) and Nef can be expressed to high levels in plastids of tobacco, a non-food crop, and tomato, a food crop with an edible fruit.

Evolutionary origin of a plant mitochondrial group II intron from a reverse transcriptase/maturase-encoding ancestor.

Group II introns are widespread in plant cell organelles. In vivo, most if not all plant group II introns do not self-splice but require the assistance of proteinaceous splicing factors. In some cases, a splicing factor (also referred to as maturase) is encoded within the intronic sequence and produced by translation of the (excised) intron RNA.