In plants,a growing amount of evidence suggests an important role for the nucleus in the establishment of developmental and adaptive processes.Recent years have contributed to an increase in the knowledge about the nuclear compartment that has been considered for a long time as an organelle in which only mechanisms such as transcription and DNA replication occurred.The scenario appears now largely more complicated,in that the nucleus has been shown to harbor a number of partially autonomous regulatory mechanisms,to such an extent that some authors claimed that the nucleus is a cell within a cell (Rodrigues et al.,2009).In 2010,Molecular Plant published a special issue bringing together a series of articles on the plant nucleus organization and functions (Volume 3,Number 4,2010).Here,we give a short highlight of these different reviews that we complement with the most recent advances in this fast-moving field.The readers are also invited to refer to the Focus Issue recently published in Plant Physiology (Cheung and Reddy,2012).