This is a plant nothing touches!
Contrary to long-held beliefs, plants and animals have developed remarkably similar mechanisms for detecting microbial invasions. This holds promise for the future treatment of infectious diseases in humans.
Continue reading… “Plants and Animals Fending Off Diseases!”
Now if they could grow pre-printed 100 dollar bills!
In theory, plants could be the ultimate “green” factories, engineered to pump out the kinds of raw materials we now obtain from petroleum-based chemicals. But in reality, getting plants to accumulate high levels of desired products has been an elusive goal.
Continue reading… “Plants created to grow PLASTIC!!!!”
A real life Jack and the Bean Stock! Genecially modified plants
Genetically modified plants can come about by natural means. A research group at Lund University in Sweden has described the details of such an event among higher plants. It is likely that the gene transfer was mediated by a parasite or a pathogen.
Continue reading… “Spontaneous GMOs in Nature”
green pistil surrounded closely by white anthers
A research team led by Teh-hui Kao, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University, in collaboration with a team lead by Professor Seiji Takayama at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, has discovered a large suite of genes in the petunia plant that acts to prevent it from breeding with itself or with its close relatives, and to promote breeding with unrelated individuals.
Continue reading… “Flowering Plants Have Evolved Multiple Genes”
When plant-eating mammals such as goats chomp on a sprig of alfalfa, they could easily gobble up some extra protein in the form of insects that happen to get in their way. But a new report in the August 10th issue of Current Biology, shows that plant-dwelling pea aphids have a strategy designed to help them avoid that dismal fate: The insects sense mammalian breath and simply drop to the ground.
Continue reading… “Insects Sense Danger on Mammals’ Breath”
A tiny, little-understood plant pore has enormous implications for weather forecasting, climate change, agriculture, hydrology, and more. A study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, with colleagues from the Research Center Jülich in Germany, has now overturned the conventional belief about how these important structures called stomata regulate water vapor loss from the leaf-a process called transpiration. They found that radiation is the driving force of physical processes deep within the leaf.
Continue reading… “Plant ‘Breathing’ Mechanism Discovered”
A reliable method for producing plants that carry genetic material from only one of their parents has been discovered by plant biologists at UC Davis. The technique, to be published March 25 in the journal Nature, could dramatically speed up the breeding of crop plants for desirable traits.
Continue reading… “Plant Breeding Breakthrough: Offspring With Genes from Only One Parent”
In the beginning is the fertilized egg cell. Following numerous cell divisions, it then develops into a complex organism with different organs and tissues. The largely unexplained process whereby the cells simply “know” the organs into which they should later develop is an astonishing phenomenon.
Flowering plants may be considerably older than previously thought, says a new analysis of the plant family tree.
Continue reading… “Flowering Plants May Be Considerably Older Than Previously Thought”
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists and their colleagues at the Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute have announced that they have completed sequencing the genome of a kind of wild grass that will enable researchers to shed light on the genetics behind hardier varieties of wheat and improved varieties of biofuel crops.
To the gardening world it may have always been considered a fact, but science has never proved the widely held belief that watering your garden in the midday sun can lead to burnt plants. Now a study into sunlit water droplets, published in New Phytologist, provides an answer that not only reverberates across gardens and allotments, but may have implications for forest fires and human sunburn.
To Charles Darwin it was an ‘abominable mystery’ and it is a question which has continued to vex evolutionists to this day: when did flowering plants evolve and how did they come to dominate plant life on earth? A new study in Ecology Letters reveals the evolutionary trigger which led to early flowering plants gaining a major competitive advantage over rival species, leading to their subsequent boom and abundance.
Continue reading… “How Did Flowering Plants Evolve to Dominate Earth?”
