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1. Invasive plant benefits a native plant through plant-soil feedback but remains the superior competitor

   https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.64.57746  

   Buerdsell, Sherri L.; Milligan, Brook G.; Lehnhoff, Erik A. (January 2021, NeoBiota)

   null (Ed.)

   Plant soil feedback (PSF) occurs when a plant modifies soil biotic properties and those changes in turn influence plant growth, survival or reproduction. These feedback effects are not well understood as mechanisms for invasive plant species. Eragrostis lehmanniana is an invasive species that has extensively colonized the southwest US. To address how PSFs may affect E. lehmanniana invasion and native Bouteloua gracilis growth, soil inoculant from four sites of known invasion age at the Appleton-Whittell Audubon Research Ranch in Sonoita, AZ were used in a PSF greenhouse study, incorporating a replacement series design. The purpose of this research was to evaluate PSF conspecific and heterospecific effects and competition outcomes between the invasive E. lehmanniana and a native forage grass, Bouteloua gracilis . Eragrostis lehmanniana PSFs were beneficial to B. gracilis if developed in previously invaded soil. Plant-soil feedback contributed to competitive suppression of B. gracilis only in the highest ratio of E. lehmanniana to B. gracilis . Plant-soil feedback did not provide an advantage to E. lehmanniana in competitive interactions with B. gracilis at low competition levels but were advantageous to E. lehmanniana at the highest competition ratio, indicating a possible density-dependent effect. Despite being beneficial to B. gracilis under many conditions, E. lehmanniana was the superior competitor. 

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2. Plant 3D (P3D): a plant phenotyping toolkit for 3D point clouds

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa220  

   Ziamtsov, Illia; Navlakha, Saket (March 2020, Bioinformatics)

   Xu, Jinbo (Ed.)

   Abstract Motivation Developing methods to efficiently analyze 3D point cloud data of plant architectures remain challenging for many phenotyping applications. Here, we describe a tool that tackles four core phenotyping tasks: classification of cloud points into stem and lamina points, graph skeletonization of the stem points, segmentation of individual lamina and whole leaf labeling. These four tasks are critical for numerous downstream phenotyping goals, such as quantifying plant biomass, performing morphological analyses of plant shapes and uncovering genotype to phenotype relationships. The Plant 3D tool provides an intuitive graphical user interface, a fast 3D rendering engine for visualizing plants with millions of cloud points, and several graph-theoretic and machine-learning algorithms for 3D architecture analyses. Availability and implementation P3D is open-source and implemented in C++. Source code and Windows installer are freely available at https://github.com/iziamtso/P3D/. Contact iziamtso@ucsd.edu or navlakha@cshl.edu Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. 

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3. Plant Membrane-On-A-Chip: A Platform for Studying Plant Membrane Proteins and Lipids

   https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.3c18562  

   Stuebler, Martin; Manzer, Zachary A; Liu, Han-Yuan; Miller, Julia; Richter, Annett; Krishnan, Srinivasan; Selivanovitch, Ekaterina; Banuna, Barituziga; Jander, Georg; Reimhult, Erik; et al (April 2024, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces)

   The cell plasma membrane is a two-dimensional, fluid mosaic material composed of lipids and proteins that create a semipermeable barrier defining the cell from its environment. Compared with soluble proteins, the methodologies for the structural and functional characterization of membrane proteins are challenging. An emerging tool for studies of membrane proteins in mammalian systems is a “plasma membrane on a chip,” also known as a supported lipid bilayer. Here, we create the “plant-membrane-on-a-chip,″ a supported bilayer made from the plant plasma membranes of Arabidopsis thaliana, Nicotiana benthamiana, or Zea mays. Membrane vesicles from protoplasts containing transgenic membrane proteins and their native lipids were incorporated into supported membranes in a defined orientation. Membrane vesicles fuse and orient systematically, where the cytoplasmic side of the membrane proteins faces the chip surface and constituents maintain mobility within the membrane plane. We use plant-membrane-on-a-chip to perform fluorescent imaging to examine protein–protein interactions and determine the protein subunit stoichiometry of FLOTILLINs. We report here that like the mammalian FLOTILLINs, FLOTILLINs expressed in Arabidopsis form a tetrameric complex in the plasma membrane. This plant-membrane-on-a-chip approach opens avenues to studies of membrane properties of plants, transport phenomena, biophysical processes, and protein–protein and protein–lipid interactions in a convenient, cell-free platform. 

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4. Plant Individuality: A Physiological Approach

   https://doi.org/10.3998/ptpbio.5261  

   Yilmaz, Özlem; Dupré, John (June 2025, Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology)

   While plants provide some of the most interesting cases for individuality-related problems in philosophy of biology (e.g., Clarke 2012; Gerber 2018), no work has examined plant individuality through specifically focusing on physiological processes, a lacuna this paper aims to fill. We think that different domains of biology suggest different approaches, and our specific focus on physiological processes, such as plant hormone systems and source-sink balance regulations, will help to identify coordinated systems at different scales. Identifying physiological individuals is crucial for a wide range of research in plant biology, including research on plant nutrition, transport and accumulation of nutrients in edible parts, and plant responses to various stress conditions such as plant diseases and changing abiotic conditions. Although plants do produce systemic responses to local stimuli (e.g., a sudden wound on one leaf can result in a whole-plant response), considering them as individuals is (often) problematic. They are highly modular organisms, and they can grow vegetatively, constituting clones of what seem, superficially, to be individual organisms. Moreover, as with animals, there are problems raised by their symbiotic relations to micro-organisms, most notably the mycorrhiza, through which they may be connected to other plants. We argue that coordinated plant systems can be distinguished at multiple scales from a physiological perspective. While none of these is a unit that must be necessarily called “the individual,” they offer integrated approaches for various research problems in plant science. 

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5. Rapid plant-to-plant systemic signaling via a Cuscuta bridge

   https://doi.org/10.1093/plphys/kiae339  

   Fichman, Yosef; Peláez-Vico, María Ángeles; Mudalige, Asha Kaluwella; Lee, Hyun-Oh; Mittler, Ron; Park, So-Yon (June 2024, Plant Physiology)

   Two plants connected via a Cuscuta bridge exchange rapid systemic calcium, electric, and reactive oxygen species signals, suggesting that Cuscuta may have beneficial effects to host plants. 

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