The last stand - Plant stem cells put up a fight against viruses

17-Oct-2023 - Viruses are a threat to all organisms, including plants. A small group of plant stem cells, however, successfully defends itself from infection. Marco Incarbone, now at MPIMP Golm, Gabriele Bradamante and their co-authors at the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI) uncovered ...

Autophagy: The molecular regulation of self-eating

Discovery of a molecular switch

14-Feb-2023 - Autophagy, or “self-eating”, is an essential cellular quality control mechanism that clears the cell of protein aggregates and damaged organelles. This mechanism is inactive under normal conditions and only triggered upon persistent cellular stress. Researchers from the Gregor Mendel Institute of ...

New stop along the cellular journey of recycling organelles in plants

26-Oct-2022 - A “hub and spoke” system enables plant cells to efficiently coordinate cellular trafficking, particularly for cellular recycling, the so-called autophagy process. Specialized vesicles, the autophagosomes, engulf harmful molecules and carry them to the vacuole, where they are degraded. During this ...

When mothers shut down the fathers’ genes in the embryo

“With our work, we were able to highlight a unique aspect of biology, a slice of nature’s broad diversity”

25-Aug-2022 - In humans, and many other species, both genes inherited from the mother and from the father influence how embryos develop. In the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha, however, the mother has total control, as researchers from the Berger lab at GMI now uncovered. In a study published in eLife, the ...

Lockdown for genome parasites

Researchers uncover an ingenious mechanism by which Arabidopsis safeguards the integrity of its genome

12-Apr-2021 - Is it possible for one single gene product to silence undesirable genetic elements? Can such a strong effect be seen in the regulation of Transposable Elements (TEs), or genome parasites? If yes, how does this gene product singlehandedly keep transposons in check? New research from Frédéric ...