Front cover image:

The upper panel are photo of rice plants showing developmental traits, and the bottom-panel are rice blast lesions showing disease resistance of rice. This figure illustrates that editing the phosphorylation motif of OsCPK18 (OsCPK18-GE middle) resulting improvement of yield-related traits and disease-resistance. While overexpressing OsCPK18 (OsCPK18-AC) resulted improving yield with trade-off of disease resistance, and vice versa, OsCPK18-RNAi increases resistance but reduces yield. Cover illustration refers to the article in this issue (Li et al., 2258–2271).

Post-transcriptional RNA modifications, particularly N⁶-methyladenosine (m⁶A), in mRNAs play a crucial role in plant stress responses, which could a potential strategy for breeding stress-tolerant crops by engineering mRNA modifications.

Maize male-sterility mutant pksb displays dense anther cuticle but thin pollen exine. ZmPKSB has conserved polyketide synthase activities dependent on a catalytic triad (C171, H320 and N353). ZmPKSB is directly activated by a transcription factor ZmMYB84, thus forming a regulatory module (ZmMYB84-ZmPKSB) that plays synchronous roles in anther cuticle and pollen exine formation required for male fertility. The ZmMYB84-ZmPKSB regulatory module controls a trade-off of lipid-metabolic products individually used for anther cuticle and pollen exine formation.

With scRNA-seq, cotton fibre cell was identified differentiated at −1 DPA. It further refines the spatiotemporal patterns of two command genes, MYB25-like and HOX3, who determine fibre differentiation and tip-biased diffuse growth respectively.

Bio-SCAN-based point of care system for genotyping of plant genome for pathogens and herbicide resistance alleles and detection of transgenes and phytopathogens on lateral flow strips.