A high quality international journal   Physiologia Plantarum is SPPS's international journal published by Blackwell Publishing. It is dedicated to original research that advances our understanding of the primary physiological and molecular mechanisms governing plant development, growth and productivity.   Physiologia Plantarum presented its new cover January 2005. Graphic by Gorm Palmgren. In addition to regular articles, Physiologia Plantarum also publishes Minireviews and Technical Focus papers. Moreover, Special Issues that contain several reviews focusing on recent advances in a selected field are published several times every year. Physiologia Plantarum ranks as an impressive #8 among the 136 most cited international plant science journals. The impact factor is presently 2.017 and rising. Editor-in-Chief Vaughan Hurry, Associate Professor at Umeå Plant Science Centre in Sweden, and the journal representatives have recently taken several initiatives in order to make the journal even better for both readers and authors. Read about these efforts in two recent aricles in SPPS Newsletter by clicking here and here. You can find more information about Physiologia Plantarum on the journals official website.   Read featured articles for free   An article of general interest from Physiologia Plantarum is highlighted and commented in each issue of SPPS Newsletter. Below you can see our recent pickings and the original article is freely available from the publisher, Blackwell, by simply clicking the reference!   Comforting proteins A dehydrin protein from Rhododendron plays a key role in freezing tolerance due to protection from cellular dehydration caused by extracellular freezing. Rajeev Arora and co-workers from Iowa State University have shown that purified RcDhn5-encoded acidic SK2 type dehydrin can protect enzyme activity against dehydration in in viro assays. When the gene was constitutively expressed in Arabidopsis, the transgenic plants exhibited increased freezing tolerance withour prior cold acclimation. With cold acclimation, however, the effect was less pronounced. This is apparently due to dilution of the Rhododendron dehydrin by less effective native dehydrins. Read full article free: Peng et al. (December 2008) Physiologia Plantarum 134: 583-597   Freezing cucumbers Not all cucumbers should be kept in the fridge according to a study by Chinese scientists at Shandong Agricultural University. They have studied how antioxidants help to protect two cultivars of cucumber from cold induced ultrastructural damage to cellular and organelle membranes. The aim was to find indicators for chilling resistance that can be used in breeding programs, and glutathione, glutathione reductase and catalase seemed to be good candidates. Relative to the chilling-sensitive cultivar, Jinyan no. 4, activities of the first two increased during cold stress in the chilling-resistant cultivar, Xintaimici, while catalase activity was only moderately decreased. Changes in antioxidant activities between the two cultivars also correlated with differences in ultrastructure. Read full article free: Xu et al. (April 2008) Physiologia Plantarum 132: 467-478   How tubulins build the structure of barley It takes more than just a single type of tubulin, the major subunit of microtubules, to build the structural framework for the developing barley embryo. Expression profiles of 14 different tubulin genes generated by German and Ukrainian scientists have revealed that their levels of expression differed significantly during development. In general, expression of all the tubulin genes peaked at two days after flowering - apparently to sustain mitosis during endosperm formation. A less prominent peak around 8 days after flowering included only some tubulins and is believed to involve cell wall organization. One gene, HvTUA5 had a very distinct expression profile which is apparently associated with shoot establishment. Read full article free: Radchunk et al. (December 2007) Physiologia Plantarum 131: 571-580   Arabidopsis get excited Action potentials, i.e. rapid and transient changes of the membrane potential that travel over long distances, are not unique to animals. Several plants exploit them for various purposes: capturing insects in the carnivorous Venus flytrap, rapid movement of leaves in Mimosa and triggering of a systemic response following injure in tomato. However, action potentials in plants have not been thoroughly studied due to the lack of a suitable and reproducible model system. Now Swiss scientists propose Arabidopsis thaliana as such a model. Excitation by electrodes in the distal part of the leaf caused reproducible action potentials that travelled down through the petiole at a speed of 1.2 mm/s. Read full article free: Favre & Agosti (October 2007) Physiologia Plantarum 131: 263-272   Mycorrhizal fungi make host cleave sugar Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are deficient in carbon acquisition capabilities and completely depend on the roots of a host plant for carbon supply. It has been assumed that sucrose is hydrolyzed by cell wall invertases at the plant-fungus interface, and that the resulting hexoses are subsequently taken up by the fungus. The involvement of such a cell wall invertase has, however, not previously been shown, but now Spanish scientists from Granada have provided the evidence. They show that both cell wall and vacuolar invertases are upregulated in infected tomato roots, and that this is a direct consequence of fungal infection. Read full article free: Garcia-Rodriguez et al (April 2007) Physiologia Plantarum 12: 737-746   Transcriptomics on spoiled fruit Rot in strawberries are often caused by the fungus Colletotrichum acutatum, one of the most important diseases in strawberry production. Only little is known about the molecular biology of the host-pathogen interaction, but now Spanish researchers have used transcriptomics to investigate the genes involved. They generated subtracted cDNA libraries from susceptible and resistant cultivars of strawberry containing only transcripts that were either up- or downregulated after infection with C. acutatum. This revealed a number of defence genes that were activated in the resistant cultivar, and surprisingly the same genes were downregulated in the susceptible cultivar. Read full article free: Casado-Diaz et al (December 2006) Physiologia Plantarum 128: 633-650   Tuned channels Coping with osmotic stress requires a plant to adjust both the water level and the salt concentration within its cells, and according to a new Chinese study these functions seem to be co-regulated. Scientists from Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences studied potassium and water channels in 3 weeks old rice seedlings. During water stress genes encoding both water channel and potassium channel proteins were downregulated, presumably in order to promote celluar water conservation. On the contrary, K+-starvation resulted in upregulation of the genes encoding both channels. Read full article free: Liu et al (September 2006) Physiologia Plantarum 128: 58-69   Design and technical solution © 2005 Palmgren kommunikation.