Plants MDPI

Plants MDPI Plants (ISSN 2223-7747) is an international, scientific, Open Access journal of plant science.

🌱 Hermaphroditism remains one of the biggest hidden risks in commercial cannabis production.🔬 This review examines the g...
12/06/2026

🌱 Hermaphroditism remains one of the biggest hidden risks in commercial cannabis production.

🔬 This review examines the genetic, hormonal, and environmental mechanisms controlling s*x expression instability in Cannabis sativa. The authors discuss how unintended pollination can reduce floral quality and cannabinoid yield, while also reviewing key drivers such as ethylene signaling, developmental stage, and environmental stress.

🧬 The paper further highlights practical tools for breeders and growers, including silver thiosulfate treatments, Raman spectroscopy, and s*x-linked molecular markers for early detection and feminized seed production.

📄 Hermaphroditism in Cannabis sativa L.: Impacts, Inducers, and Industry Implications
✍️ Chaylen Douglas Richards et al.

🔗 Read the full article here: https://brnw.ch/21x3hK3

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⚡ What if crops could be engineered for resistance with unprecedented precision?This review examines how genome editing ...
11/06/2026

⚡ What if crops could be engineered for resistance with unprecedented precision?

This review examines how genome editing technologies are accelerating the development of disease-resistant plants while overcoming many limitations of conventional breeding 🌱🧬

🔬 Emerging tools such as base editing, prime editing, and transposon-associated systems are opening new possibilities for improving crop resilience and strengthening future food security.

📄 Advances in Genome Editing for Plant Disease Resistance Breeding
✍️ Ciro Gianmaria Amoroso & Giuseppe Andolfo

🔗 Read the full article here: https://brnw.ch/21x3gJV

⛰️ Mining leaves long-lasting ecological scars — especially in fragile alpine ecosystems.🌱 This study evaluated how fert...
11/06/2026

⛰️ Mining leaves long-lasting ecological scars — especially in fragile alpine ecosystems.

🌱 This study evaluated how fertilization and seeding-rate combinations influence vegetation recovery and soil nutrient balance in degraded grasslands of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. The findings show that some treatments rapidly boosted biomass production, while others better restored long-term vegetation–soil stoichiometric balance and ecosystem stability.

📊 One treatment increased aboveground biomass by nearly 294%, while another achieved nutrient ratios closest to natural grasslands, highlighting the trade-off between rapid recovery and sustainable restoration.

📄 Optimizing Ecological Restoration in Alpine Mining Areas Through Fertilization and Seeding-Rate Management: Insights from Vegetation–Soil Stoichiometry
✍️ Nannan Hu et al.

🔗 Read the full article here: https://brnw.ch/21x3fMG

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🧬 Plants fight off fungal attackers using tiny molecular parcels — and researchers just found a key weapon inside one of...
10/06/2026

🧬 Plants fight off fungal attackers using tiny molecular parcels — and researchers just found a key weapon inside one of them.

Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) is a crop used in cooking oils, medicines, and dyes worldwide. But it's highly vulnerable to Botrytis cinerea, a fungal pathogen that causes devastating grey mould disease. Until now, the molecular mechanisms behind safflower's defence response were largely unknown.

A new study by Kang Ma et al. changes that, focusing on a fascinating frontier in plant immunity: extracellular vesicles (EVs) — nano-sized packages that plant cells release to communicate and transfer molecules, including across the boundary between plant and pathogen.

The team isolated EVs from the apoplastic washing fluid of B. cinerea-infected safflower leaves and used proteomic analysis to identify the proteins inside. Among numerous resistance-related proteins detected, one stood out: CtLTP8, a lipid transfer protein previously flagged as a resistance candidate by GWAS, now confirmed to be present within EVs.

Crucially, stable overexpression of CtLTP8 in safflower significantly increased resistance to B. cinerea — demonstrating a direct functional role in antifungal defence.

🌸 This study opens a new window into EV-mediated plant immunity in safflower, providing both a validated gene target for disease-resistance breeding and new insight into how plants weaponise their own cellular communication system against fungal invaders.

📄 Localization and Functional Analysis of CtLTP8, an Extracellular Vesicle Protein That Enhances Resistance to Botrytis cinerea in Safflower
✍️ Kang Ma et al.
🔗 Read the full article here: https://brnw.ch/21x3ePR

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🌶️ Spotting peppers in a real field image sounds simple. It really isn't.Peppers are slender. They hide behind leaves. T...
10/06/2026

🌶️ Spotting peppers in a real field image sounds simple. It really isn't.

Peppers are slender. They hide behind leaves. They vary widely in colour, shape, and size — and some are partially diseased or deformed. For AI-based detection systems, this combination of challenges routinely causes missed detections and poor localisation, especially for small or partially visible fruits.

A new study by Jiangquan Zeng et al. introduces SLP-Net, a detection framework specifically engineered for this problem. Rather than simply scaling up model size, SLP-Net uses two targeted innovations: stripe attention, designed to preserve the elongated shape cues of pepper fruits, and a dual-level contrastive learning framework that makes the model more robust to visual differences between pepper instances.

The results on two datasets — PP-Set and the more challenging CH-Set (which includes disease, deformation, and stronger background clutter) — show SLP-Net consistently outperforming comparable detectors, with the clearest advantages at higher IoU thresholds and on small targets. In other words, it performs best precisely where detection is hardest.

🤖 For precision agriculture and automated harvesting applications, reliable fruit detection in uncontrolled field conditions is a foundational requirement. SLP-Net represents a meaningful step in that direction.

📄 SLP-Net: A Dual-Level Contrastive Learning Framework with Stripe Attention for Elongated Pepper Detection in Complex Field Environments
✍️ Jiangquan Zeng et al.
🔗 Read the full article here: https://brnw.ch/21x3dV0

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Plants constantly adapt their protein synthesis machinery to survive environmental stress — and ribosome fragmentation m...
09/06/2026

Plants constantly adapt their protein synthesis machinery to survive environmental stress — and ribosome fragmentation may play a far more regulated role than previously thought.

🔬 This study investigated small 18S rRNA fragments across multiple angiosperm species and found that severe drought and osmotic stress triggered the accumulation of distinct ribosomal RNA fragments. Interestingly, wheat cultivars tolerant to osmotic stress exhibited significantly higher levels of 18S rRNA fragmentation than sensitive cultivars.

🌱 The findings suggest that ribosome fragmentation is not simply a symptom of cellular damage, but may represent an active regulatory mechanism involved in stress adaptation and developmental control.

📊 The work also highlights potential applications for crop breeding and germplasm preservation, as monitoring translational machinery integrity could help identify stress-resilient plant lines.

📄 The Content of Small 18S rRNA Fragments Is Regulated Developmentally and in Response to Stress in Plants
✍️ Angelina A. Malysheva et al.

🔗 Read the full article here: https://brnw.ch/21x3cny

🌾 Improving grain yield remains one of the most important goals for global food security — and AI is helping accelerate ...
09/06/2026

🌾 Improving grain yield remains one of the most important goals for global food security — and AI is helping accelerate discovery.

🤖 In this study, researchers developed BarleyGC, a YOLOv11-based grain detection model trained on intact barley spikes. Using 1000 spike images, the model achieved 97.1% precision and 96.7% recall for grain detection, enabling rapid and accurate phenotyping.

📊 The AI-derived measurements were then used for QTL analysis, leading to the identification of qGN-2H, a genomic region associated with grain number. The region contains the well-known Vrs1 gene, a major regulator of lateral spikelet development in barley.

🔬 This work highlights how computer vision and machine learning can dramatically speed up crop phenotyping and support breeding programs targeting higher yield potential.

📄 An Effective YOLOv11 Grain Detection Model Trained on Intact Barley Spikes Reveals a QTL Containing a Pivotal Regulator of Lateral Spikelet Formation
✍️ Brittany Clare Thornbury & Chengdao Li

🔗 Read the full article here: https://brnw.ch/21x3bY1

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🌱 Heavy metal contamination remains a major challenge for ecosystems, agriculture, and food safety worldwide.🔬 This revi...
08/06/2026

🌱 Heavy metal contamination remains a major challenge for ecosystems, agriculture, and food safety worldwide.

🔬 This review explores how nutrient availability regulates microbial metabolism, plant physiology, and rhizosphere interactions involved in heavy metal remediation. The authors highlight how fertilizers, chelating agents, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, and plant-growth-promoting rhizobacteria can enhance phytoremediation efficiency and influence metal uptake dynamics.

🧪 Key findings include sulfur-reducing bacteria precipitating metals as insoluble sulfides with up to 90% efficiency, alongside evidence that nutrient forms such as ammonium or nitrate can modify rhizosphere pH and alter metal bioavailability.

🌍 The review also discusses how emerging approaches including multi-omics, AI-assisted prediction tools, and cisgenesis may help optimize future remediation strategies for contaminated soils.

📄 Nutrient-Driven Modulation of Microbial, Plant, and Rhizosphere Processes for Heavy Metal Remediation
✍️ Lixia Wang et al

🔗 Read the full article here: https://brnw.ch/21x3aFw

🥑 Heatwaves are increasingly threatening avocado production worldwide — especially during the sensitive early fruit deve...
08/06/2026

🥑 Heatwaves are increasingly threatening avocado production worldwide — especially during the sensitive early fruit development stage.

💧 This study demonstrates that overhead evaporative cooling systems can significantly reduce heat stress in avocado orchards. Across three growing seasons, pulsing sprinklers and sprayers lowered foliage temperatures by 6–8 °C and fruitlet temperatures by up to 10 °C during spring heatwaves.

📈 The cooling treatments also improved plant water status and resulted in an average 42% increase in yield over the following three years.

🌡️ As climate change intensifies, practical orchard-scale cooling strategies could become essential tools for protecting fruit quality, reducing water stress, and sustaining avocado productivity.

📄 Evaluating Overhead Sprinklers and Sprayers for Heatwave Protection in Avocado Orchards
✍️ Arnon Dag et al.

🔗 Read the full article here: https://brnw.ch/21x3ahI

🍌 One of the world's most important crops is under threat — and scientists may have found an answer in your spice rack.M...
05/06/2026

🍌 One of the world's most important crops is under threat — and scientists may have found an answer in your spice rack.

Moko disease, caused by Ralstonia solanacearum race 2, is among the most destructive bacterial diseases affecting bananas and plantains. It causes yellowing, wilting, and ultimately plant death — spreading rapidly through plantations with few effective treatments available.

A new study by Luciano Martínez-Bolaños et al. tested the essential oil of Pimenta dioica (allspice) against this aggressive pathogen. GC-MS analysis identified 19 compounds in the oil, dominated by eugenol (72.6%), caryophyllene (6.13%), and Beta-Myrcene (4.17%).

The results are striking: complete inhibition of bacterial growth at just 500 µL/L. The estimated MIC95 came in at 297.6 µL/L — and plant trials on banana vitroplants confirmed that treatment at this concentration reduced disease severity and prevented internal corm discoloration, without causing any phytotoxic effects.

🌿 A plant-derived, natural alternative to chemical pesticides — with real potential for sustainable banana disease management.

📄 Chemical Profile and Antibacterial Effect of Pimenta dioica Essential Oil Against Ralstonia solanacearum Race 2 Causing Moko Disease on Banana Crop

✍️ Luciano Martínez-Bolaños et al.
🔗 Read the full article here: https://brnw.ch/21x378t

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