It’s not just humans waiting for Spring – recent research reveals that microbes are also looking forward to the new growth of plants.

This is an exciting time to study how different non-model species use common developmental genes to create such diversity in the plant world. In many cases researchers tend to identify, within newly available sequences, genes that putatively encode proteins similar to those genetically characterized in model species. A great toolbox of methods to study gene [...]

This month the inset cover image shows a detail of the stigma of a flower of apple, Malus × domestica. The acquisition of stigmatic receptivity is concomitant with secretion of arabinogalactan proteins (AGPs, strained green) into the intercellular spaces between cell walls (blue).