Kamila Kwasniewska

Trinity College Dublin | TCD · Department of Botany

A minuscule fraction of the Earth's paleobiological diversity is preserved in the geological record as fossils. What plant remnants have withstood taphonomic filtering, fragmentation, and alteration in their journey to become part of the fossil record provide unique information on how plants functioned in paleo‐ecosystems through their traits. Plan...

Vegetation function and distribution have changed over deep time as plant groups evolved and introduced new adaptations to their environments (plant traits). The succession of the dominant plant groups (i.e. sporophytes, gymnosperms, angiosperms) is usually assumed to have coincided with changing plant impacts on biogeochemical cycles, such as rate...

In the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the zinc-finger transcription factor KNUCKLES (KNU) plays an important role in the termination of floral meristem activity, a process that is crucial for preventing the overgrowth of flowers. The KNU gene is activated in floral meristems by the floral organ identity factor AGAMOUS (AG), and it has been shown...

Over 60 controlled environment chamber users, from over 12 institutions and companies answered the survey on their experience of working with growth chambers. Here we present the summary of results from the survey, demonstrating the importance of discussing the issue of the "chamber effect" phenomenon and its mitigation.

Controlled environments are used for the precise control of climate and growth conditions whether it be for research or industrial purposes. However, controlled environments, such as chambers or glasshouses, can be subject to “chamber effect”: defined as inconspicuous differences between or within supposedly identical chambers. Chamber effect can c...

Science is a warehouse of ideas, these ideas can come in the form of eureka moments, new research avenues, new methods or innovative solutions for long-standing problems. However, the potential of many of these ideas ends after they have reached the scientific community via publication, rarely are these ideas or solutions considered as being made i...

The transcription factors LEAFY (LFY) and APETALA1 (AP1), together with the AP1 paralog CAULIFLOWER (CAL), control the onset of flower development in a partially redundant manner. This redundancy is thought to be mediated, at least in part, through the regulation of a shared set of target genes. However, whether these genes are independently or coo...

To efficiently counteract pathogens, plants rely on a complex set of immune responses that are tightly regulated to allow the timely activation, appropriate duration and adequate amplitude of defense programs. The coordination of the plant immune response is known to require the activity of the ubiquitin/proteasome system, which controls the stabil...

The formation of flowers is one of the main model systems to elucidate the molecular mechanisms that control developmental processes in plants. Although several studies have explored gene expression during flower development in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana on a genome-wide scale, a continuous series of expression data from the earliest flor...

Understanding how flowers develop from undifferentiated stem cells has occupied developmental biologists for decades. Key to unraveling this process is a detailed knowledge of the global regulatory hierarchies that control developmental transitions, cell differentiation and organ growth. These hierarchies can be deduced from gene perturbation exper...

The floral homeotic protein AGAMOUS directs the specification of reproductive organs by controlling the expression of a plethora of other regulators. Ó'Maoiléidigh et al. (pages 2482–2503) identify the direct and indirect downstream targets of AGAMOUS during reproductive organ specification on a genome-wide scale. The cover shows the indeterminate...

The floral organ identity factor AGAMOUS (AG) is a key regulator of Arabidopsis thaliana flower development, where it is involved in the formation of the reproductive floral organs as well as in the control of meristem determinacy. To obtain insights into how AG specifies organ fate, we determined the genes and processes acting downstream of this C...

How different organs are formed from small sets of undifferentiated precursor cells is a key question in developmental biology. To understand the molecular mechanisms underlying organ specification in plants, we studied the function of the homeotic selector genes APETALA3 (AP3) and PISTILLATA (PI), which control the formation of petals and stamens...