NMD mutations in Arabidopsis

Last year, Hori and Watanabe published in Plant Journal that an Arabidopsis upf3 mutation is viable but leads to the accumulation of aberrantly spliced RNAs. Now, Yoine et al. have shown that UPF1 is essential for growth and that low-beta-amylase1, (lba1 ), a missense mutation in UPF1, causes pleiotropic effects related to sugar metabolism. There are lots of tools now to study nonsense-mediated decay in Arabidopsis.