Annual Review of Plant Biology

Biodiversity conservation requires conserving evolutionary potential-the capacity for wild populations to adapt. Understanding genetic diversity and evolutionary dynamics is critical for informing conservation decisions that enhance adaptability and persistence under environmental change. We review how emerging landscape genomic methods provide plant conservation programs with insights into evolutionary dynamics, including local adaptation and its environmental drivers. Landscape genomic approaches that explore relationships between genomic variation and environments complement rather than replace established population genomic and common garden approaches for assessing adaptive phenotypic variation, population structure, gene flow, and demography...

Understanding the mechanistic basis of epigenetic memory has proven to be a difficult task due to the underlying complexity of the systems involved in its establishment and maintenance. Here, we review the role of computational modeling in helping to unlock this complexity, allowing the dissection of intricate feedback dynamics. We focus on three forms of epigenetic memory encoded in gene regulatory networks, DNA methylation, and histone modifications and discuss the important advantages offered by plant systems in their dissection...

Amphibious plants can grow and survive in both aquatic and terrestrial environments. This review explores the diverse adaptations that enable them to thrive in such contrasting habitats. Plants with amphibious lifestyles possess fascinating traits, and their phenotypic plasticity plays an important role in adaptations. Heterophylly, the ability to produce different leaf forms, is one such trait, with submerged leaves generally being longer, narrower, and thinner than aerial leaves. In addition to drastic changes in leaf contours, amphibious plants display significant anatomical and physiological changes, including a reduction in stomatal number and cuticle thickness and changes in photosynthesis mode...

C4 perennial bioenergy grasses are an economically and ecologically important group whose responses to climate change will be important to the future bioeconomy. These grasses are highly productive and frequently possess large geographic ranges and broad environmental tolerances, which may contribute to the evolution of ecotypes that differ in physiological acclimation capacity and the evolution of distinct functional strategies. C4 perennial bioenergy grasses are predicted to thrive under climate change-C4 photosynthesis likely evolved to enhance photosynthetic efficiency under stressful conditions of low [CO2 ], high temperature, and drought-although few studies have examined how these species will respond to combined stresses or to extremes of temperature and precipitation...

Initially identified as a key regulator of female fertility in Arabidopsis , the FERONIA (FER) receptor kinase is now recognized as crucial for almost all aspects of plant growth and survival. FER partners with a glycosylphosphatidylinositol-anchored protein of the LLG family to act as coreceptors on the cell surface. The FER-LLG coreceptor interacts with different RAPID ALKALINIZATION FACTOR (RALF) peptide ligands to function in various growth and developmental processes and to respond to challenges from the environment...

The shoot meristem of land plants maintains the capacity for organ generation throughout its lifespan due to a group of undifferentiated stem cells. Most meristems are shaped like a dome with a precise spatial arrangement of functional domains, and, within and between these domains, cells interact through a network of interconnected signaling pathways. Intercellular communication in meristems is mediated by mobile transcription factors, small RNAs, hormones, and secreted peptides that are perceived by membrane-localized receptors...

Plant specialized metabolites (PSMs) are variably distributed across taxa, tissues, and ecological contexts; this variability has inspired many theories about PSM function, which to-date remain poorly tested because predictions have outpaced the available data. Advances in mass spectrometry-based metabolomics have enabled unbiased PSM profiling, and molecular biology techniques have produced PSM-free plants; the combination of these methods has accelerated our understanding of the complex ecological roles that PSMs play in plants...

B vitamins are a source of coenzymes for a vast array of enzyme reactions, particularly those of metabolism. As metabolism is the basis of decisions that drive maintenance, growth, and development, B vitamin-derived coenzymes are key components that facilitate these processes. For over a century, we have known about these essential compounds and have elucidated their pathways of biosynthesis, repair, salvage, and degradation in numerous organisms. Only now are we beginning to understand their importance for regulatory processes, which are becoming an important topic in plants...

Multicellularity has emerged multiple times in evolution, enabling groups of cells to share a living space and reducing the burden of solitary tasks. While unicellular organisms exhibit individuality and independence, cooperation among cells in multicellular organisms brings specialization and flexibility. However, multicellularity also necessitates intercellular dependence and relies on intercellular communication. In plants, this communication is facilitated by plasmodesmata: intercellular bridges that allow the direct (cytoplasm-to-cytoplasm) transfer of information between cells...

Florets of cereal crops are the basic reproductive organs that produce grains for food or feed. The birth of a floret progresses through meristem initiation and floral organ identity specification and maintenance. During these processes, both endogenous and external cues can trigger a premature floral organ death, leading to reproductive failure. Recent advances in different cereal crops have identified both conserved and distinct regulators governing the birth of a floret. However, the molecular underpinnings of floral death are just beginning to be understood...

Plant vascular tissues are crucial for the long-distance transport of water, nutrients, and a multitude of signal molecules throughout the plant body and, therefore, central to plant growth and development. The intricate development of vascular tissues is orchestrated by unique populations of dedicated stem cells integrating endogenous as well as environmental cues. This review summarizes our current understanding of vascular-related stem cell biology and of vascular tissue differentiation. We present an overview of the molecular and cellular mechanisms governing the maintenance and fate determination of vascular stem cells and highlight the interplay between intrinsic and external cues...

Leaves form veins whose patterns vary from a single vein running the length of the leaf to networks of staggering complexity where huge numbers of veins connect to other veins at both ends. For the longest time, vein formation was thought to be controlled only by the polar, cell-to-cell transport of the plant hormone auxin; recent evidence suggests that is not so. Instead, it turns out that vein patterning features are best accounted for by a combination of polar auxin transport, facilitated auxin diffusion through plasmodesmata intercellular channels, and auxin signal transduction-though the latter's precise contribution remains unclear...

Climate change profoundly affects the timing of seasonal activities of organisms, known as phenology. The impact of climate change is not unidirectional; it is also influenced by plant phenology as plants modify atmospheric composition and climatic processes. One important aspect of this interaction is the emission of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs), which link the Earth's surface, atmosphere, and climate. BVOC emissions exhibit significant diurnal and seasonal variations and are therefore considered essential phenological traits...

This review focuses on the intricate relationship between plant polyamines and the genetic circuits and signaling pathways that regulate various developmental programs and the defense responses of plants when faced with biotic and abiotic aggressions. Particular emphasis is placed on genetic evidence supporting the involvement of polyamines in specific processes, such as the pivotal role of thermospermine in regulating xylem cell differentiation and the significant contribution of polyamine metabolism in enhancing plant resilience to drought...

A major bottleneck in the crop improvement pipeline is our ability to phenotype crops quickly and efficiently. Image-based, high-throughput phenotyping has a number of advantages because it is nondestructive and reduces human labor, but a new challenge arises in extracting meaningful information from large quantities of image data. Deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence, is an approach used to analyze image data and make predictions on unseen images that ultimately reduces the need for human input in computation...

Plants take up metals, including the essential micronutrients [iron (Fe), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), and manganese (Mn)] and the toxic heavy metal cadmium (Cd), from soil and accumulate these metals in their edible parts, which are direct and indirect intake sources for humans. Multiple transporters belonging to different families are required to transport a metal from the soil to different organs and tissues, but only a few of them have been fully functionally characterized. The transport systems (the transporters required for uptake, translocation, distribution, redistribution, and their regulation) differ with metals and plant species, depending on the physiological roles, requirements of each metal, and anatomies of different organs and tissues...

Photosynthesis has been using energy from sunlight to assimilate atmospheric CO2 for at least 3.5 billion years. Through evolution and natural selection, photosynthetic organisms have flourished in almost all aquatic and terrestrial environments. This is partly due to the diversity of light-harvesting complex (LHC) proteins, which facilitate photosystem assembly, efficient excitation energy transfer, and photoprotection. Structural advances have provided Ångström-level structures of many of these proteins and have expanded our understanding of the pigments, lipids, and residues that drive LHC function...

Thirty years have passed since the discovery of the Mediator complex in yeast. We are witnessing breakthroughs and advances that have led to high-resolution structural models of yeast and mammalian Mediators in the preinitiation complex, showing how it is assembled and how it positions the RNA polymerase II and its C-terminal domain (CTD) to facilitate the CTD phosphorylation that initiates transcription. This information may be also used to guide future plant research on the mechanisms of Mediator transcriptional control...

One of life's decisive innovations was to harness the catalytic power of metals for cellular chemistry. With life's expansion, global atmospheric and biogeochemical cycles underwent dramatic changes. Although initially harmful, they permitted the evolution of multicellularity and the colonization of land. In land plants as primary producers, metal homeostasis faces heightened demands, in part because soil is a challenging environment for nutrient balancing. To avoid both nutrient metal limitation and metal toxicity, plants must maintain the homeostasis of metals within tighter limits than the homeostasis of other minerals...

Endocytosis is an essential eukaryotic process that maintains the homeostasis of the plasma membrane proteome by vesicle-mediated internalization. Its predominant mode of operation utilizes the polymerization of the scaffold protein clathrin forming a coat around the vesicle; therefore, it is termed clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME). Throughout evolution, the machinery that mediates CME is marked by losses, multiplications, and innovations. CME employs a limited number of conserved structural domains and folds, whose assembly and connections are species dependent...