Plant Molecular Biology is an international journal of fundamental plant research providing a rapid publication of research in molecular biology biochemistry and molecular genetics of higher and lower plants including cyanobacteria and algae. Plant Molecular Biology welcomes manuscripts of general interest to the plant molecular biology community. However because space in the journal is limited preference is given to those papers that represent important advances and/or that contribute fundamental information to the field. Plant Molecular Biology receives many gene discovery and/or gene sequence papers. While we encourage papers in plant genomics and bioinformatics we have made it a policy that gene discovery papers must be accompanied by significant biological biochemical or protein structural information. Gene discovery papers accompanied only by a simple DNA blot (Southern analysis) and/or RNA blot (tissue-specific or developmental stage expression) are no longer accepted for publication. Neither are protein sequence data that can be derived from standard DNA analysis programs (hydropathy blots simple alignments simple cladistic analysis and so forth). Papers that do not meet these requirements will be returned without outside review.