Arabidopsis Research Round-up

It’s all about the Institutes in today’s UK Arabidopsis Research Round-up! New work this week comes from the John Innes Centre, the Sainsbury Laboratory, Rothamsted Research – and theEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI) based in Cambridge, makes an appearance too.

With collaborators in Germany, researchers from the John Innes Centre and the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich deduce that complexes between the adapter proteins importin-a, and the cargo proteins they recruit for active nuclear transport, are formed dependent upon cargo specificity, variation at the importin-a nuclear localisation sequence-binding sites, and tissue-specific expression levels of importin-a.

This Bioscience Report included a number of researchers from Rothamsted Research, and explores the previously poorly understood roles of three cytosolic acyl-CoA-bding proteins (ACBPs). Microarray data revealed that all three are expressed in seeds, but further analysis in transgenic Arabidopsis revealed overlapping, but differing physiological effects on seeds.

Led by a French team, this study also involved Oliver Stegle from EMBL-EBI in Cambridge. Using drought stress as an example of environmental variation, the aim here was to produce a detailed map of the ways in which cis- and trans-acting factors affect gene expression and responses to environmental conditions in Arabidopsis thaliana.

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