Key message Modification of silent latent endosperm-enabled promoters (SLEEPERs) allows the ectopic activation of non-expressed metabolic genes in rice callus Abstract Metabolic engineering in plants typically involves transgene expression or the mutation of endogenous genes. An alternative is promoter modification, where small changes in the promoter sequence allow genes to be switched on or off in particular tissues. To acti...

A tenet of ecology is that temporal variability in ecological structure and processes tends to decrease with increasing spatial scales (from locales to regions) and levels of biological organization (from populations to communities). However, patterns in temporal variability across trophic levels and the mechanisms that produce them remain poorly understood. Here we analyzed the abundance time series of spatially structured co...