Call for papers - Advances in plant RNA biology

Guest Editors

Ulhas Sopanrao Kadam, PhD, Gyeongsang National University, South Korea
Ruslan Kalendar, PhD, University of Helsinki, Finland

Submission Status: Open | Submission Deadline: 14 March 2025

BMC Plant Biology announces the Collection Advances in plant RNA biology to highlight the recent advances on how we understand the mechanisms and functions of RNA regulation in plants. This collection seeks to gather cutting-edge research on the topics such as RNA processing, modifications, mobility, and stability in plants, as well as RNA-protein interactions, non-coding RNAs, RNA silencing, small RNAs, synthetic RNA design, and CRISPR-RNA engineering.

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Meet the Guest Editors

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Ulhas Sopanrao Kadam, PhD, Gyeongsang National University, South Korea

Dr Kadam is a Research Professor at Gyeongsang National University in South Korea. He completed his Master’s in Chemistry in 2011 and his PhD in Biological Engineering in 2014, both from Purdue University, USA. He has previously worked as a Young Scientist Fellow with SERB-DST in India. In 2018, he received the prestigious Humboldt Fellowship from Germany, allowing him to conduct research at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam. His research interests span multidisciplinary areas of applied life sciences, including alternative splicing of RNAs, RNA modifications, gene silencing, molecular diagnostics of pathogens and toxic contaminants, and CRISPR-Cas applications.

Ruslan Kalendar, PhD, University of Helsinki, Finland

Dr Kalendar is a professor of biology at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and a leading researcher at Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan). He is an expert in molecular biology, genetics, chemistry, and bioinformatics. Dr Kalendar’s primary focus is on molecular genetics, particularly the evolution of genomes and mobile genetic elements. He is interested in the evolutionary processes that drive the spread and diversification of mobile genetic elements and their inactive descendants in eukaryotic genomes. Additionally, he has interests in the use of DNA technology for diagnostic research, software development, genomics, and comparative bioinformatics.

About the Collection

The study of RNAs has become an extremely influential research area in contemporary biology. In plants, RNA regulation affects many critical biological processes, from gene regulation, RNA-mediated signaling or epigenetic modifications, to plant development, stress acclimation and adaptation to changing environmental conditions. Recent technological progress and new sequencing technologies applied to RNA research have contributed to produce exciting discoveries in the broad field of ‘plant RNA biology’ and have the potential to provide new insights into the functional relevance of RNA regulation in plants.

To highlight the recent advances on how we understand the mechanisms and functions of RNA regulation in plants, and to address the open questions in the field, BMC Plant Biology announces the Collection Advances in plant RNA biology. This collection seeks to gather research on the diversity, functions and regulatory mechanisms of RNAs in plants. We invite researchers and experts in the field to submit research articles that cover, but are not limited to, the following topics:

RNA processing and modification in plants
RNA post-transcriptional modifications in plants
RNA mobility in plants
The role of non-coding RNAs in plant growth, development and stress response
RNA-protein interactions in plants and plant RNA-binding proteins
RNA secondary structure in plants: conservation and function
Plant RNA stability and degradation
RNA silencing in plants
RNA methylation in plants
Small RNA involved in plant epigenetic regulation
Plant small RNAs, including microRNAs and other small regulatory RNAs
Plant riboswitches
RNA editing and its role in plant organelles
R-loops and circRNAs: emerging genome regulatory elements in plants
Synthetic RNA design and modifications
RNA nanotechnology in plants
CRISPR-RNA (gRNA and crRNA) engineering

There are currently no articles in this collection.

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of original Research Articles. Should you wish to submit a different article type, please read our submission guidelines to confirm that type is accepted by the journal. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select "Advances in plant RNA biology" from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.