Duckweeds (Lemnaceae) are ideal model plants and valuable biotech resources with diverse trophic strategies, including mixotrophy. This study investigates the mechanisms and value of mixotrophy in Spirodela polyrhiza 7498. It demonstrates that mixotrophy endows duckweed with significant phenotypic and metabolic flexibility. Under mixotrophic conditions, duckweed enhances intracellular CO₂...
Edna Ben-Izhak Monselise*
Department of Life Science, Bergmann Campus, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 8441901, Israel
bened@post.bgu.ac.il
Cellular stress responses involve extensive metabolic reprogramming. While alterations in amino acid concentrations under stress have been widely documented, the potential role of amino acid chirality in stress adaptation remains poorly...
Chloroplasts relocate within cells to maximize energy capture under limiting light and/or to minimize exposure to excess light. In higher plants these movements are mediated by phototropins, blue light photoreceptors that control also other light acclimation processes.
Chloroplast movements share many similarities between the aquatic angiosperm L. trisulca and Arabidopsis thaliana....
Duckweed is a uniquely fast and tractable plant model, making it ideal for studying dynamic plant–environment interactions on time scales impossible with conventional crop or model species. However, fully harnessing this in duckweed requires sample-level environmental control paired with dense temporal phenotyping. Standard room-scale or chamber-scale growth systems lack the targeted...
Duckweeds are unusual among angiosperms in being able to acquire nutrients through the shoot rather than the root. We previously showed that their roots are dispensable for this ancestral function, and that they have lost root-biased nutrient transporter expression (Ware et al., 2023). The cellular biology underpinning shoot nutrient uptake, and its evolution, remain unknown.
To address this,...
Salinity primarily reduces plant productivity by disrupting the photosynthetic apparatus, and cytokinins are considered to be context-dependent regulators of its tolerance (1-3). This study aimed to determine if and how 6-benzylaminopurine (1 μM 6-BA) protects the photosynthetic apparatus of Lemna minor under salt stress (50, 100, 150 mM NaCl) and to analyze how it modulates accompanying...
