A new Plant Physiology paper, authored by UC Davis plant scientists Ella Katz, Dan Kliebenstein, and undergrads Alycia Rasmussen and Aleshia Hooper, was featured as ‘Plant Physiology Article of the Week’ in The Signal, a weekly publication of the American Society of Plant Biologists.
Mitochondria in cells generate energy for the cell and play roles in metabolism and programmed cell death. Not all mitochondria are the same — plant mitochondria are quite different from animal mitochondria. New research from the UC Davis Genome Center and partnering universities shows just how different.
Brassica plants, such as broccoli, produce metabolites that benefit humans (flavor, anti-cancer defenses), benefit the plant (attacking insects) and, in new research, defend against drought. Dan Kliebenstein’s lab examines drought tolerance in Arabidopsis.
Philip Day, Steven Theg, and the late Kentaro Inoue, all UC Davis, determined how β-barrel proteins are sorted in plant chloroplast envelopes. Chloroplasts, which are responsible for photosynthesis in plants, evolved about a billion years ago from an ancient endosymbiotic relationship between a cyanobacteria species and a eukaryotic cell.
UC Davis researchers have partnered with a federally compliant pharmaceutical company to analyze the chemical and biological profiles of cannabis for the benefit of law enforcement, health care providers, and scientific professionals. A Cannabis and Hemp Research Center is also being established at UC Davis.
Understanding the steps in metabolic and biochemical pathways is difficult to determine. Scientists at UC Davis and Ben-Gurion University applied machine learning (artificial intelligence) techniques to this problem in tomatoes, and predicted new, previously unknown metabolic pathways.
By isolating vesicles in plant cells, researchers were able to detect polysaccharides within, which helps scientists finally understand how plant cell walls are constructed.