Matter scatters a very small amount of light in a different colour to the one used to illuminate a sample. This change in colour can be used to measure the chemical content of plants in a non-invasive manner. Raman spectroscopy, as a tool, provides great opportunities to study plant physiology and crops.

Plant vacuoles are the main cellular compartment to store important minerals such as potassium. The vacuolar Two Pore Potassium Channels (TPKs) play an important role in potassium exchange between cytosol and vacuolar sap. The possible role of these channels in plant tolerance to various abiotic stresses is summarised, the possible evolutional direction is discussed and the future prospective areas for the study of TPK/KCO3 are addressed.

Since the chloroplast genome is a powerful tool for studying systematic evolution of medicinal plants and species identification. Presently, only five species of Lepidium have been widely used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The cp genome sequences of the five Lepidium medicinal plants reported here will pave the way for breeding, species identification, phylogenetic evolution, and cp genetic engineering studies of Lepidium medicinal plants.

Planting forage with improved drought tolerance on hot arid marginal lands will be a potential and sustainable way to resolve the conflict between food crops and pastures competing for limited farmland resources. In this study, for the first time, we isolated drought-related genes by detecting physiological responses and constructing suppression subtractive hybridisation (SSH) cDNA libraries, and preliminarily explained the drought resistance mechanism of Lotus corniculatus L. This adaptive strategy could provide a basis for improving forage stress resistance.

Global warming and the growing demand for food threaten production agriculture worldwide. An analysis of heat-sensitive Arabidopsis thaliana L. mutant transcriptome to help discover genes contributing to its heat responses and associated physiological processes is essential. The expression of genes related to heat stress factors, auxin response, and cellular communication, and abiotic stress signalling pathways were altered in heat-sensitive mutant plants. Identified genes and its regulatory network in heat response are invaluable for rationale strategies to improve plant productivity.