Smoke is a crucial germination trigger in ecosystems with naturally recurring fires, such as savannas and Mediterranean forests. There are various compounds in smoke, yet karrikins (KARs) –the primary product of cellulose combustion– have dominated the research efforts to elucidate the mechanisms behind smoke-promoted germination. In this piece, Cao and collaborators draw our attention to […]
Climate change profoundly impacts plant communities, for example, by changing the geographic range of some species and locally extinguishing others. Yet these changes take time, maybe a few years, to be observed. This lag between climate and plant communities changes could result from the soil seed bank (i.e., the reserve of viable, ungerminated seeds in […]
Seeds not only carry the embryo that will germinate and give rise to a new individual, but they are also the vector to the next generation for microorganisms from the mother plant and the environment. Consequently, seeds link the microbiome between plant generations. In this thorough review, Abdelfattah and colleagues take us on the journey […]
Physical dormancy is imposed by an impermeable seed coat that prevents water uptake. For germination to occur, this coat must be broken. Fire passage, for example, breaks physical dormancy in ecosystems where such events are recurrent. However, the mechanisms behind how fire achieves this has yet to be explored. Fatty acids (FAs) influence seed coat […]
One of the current challenges in seed conservation is identifying the genetic basis that defines how long seeds can be stored before losing viability. This challenge is exceptionally crucial for rice, a cereal that feeds roughly half of the world’s population. However, most studies looking for determinant genes for seed longevity use warm and moist […]
Many plants have gone extinct in their natural habitat, but persist as samples preserved in herbaria around the globe. The existance of these samples raises questions about the possibility of using them to “bring back to life” these species, for example, by germinating the seeds or spores available in the herbarium material. However, there is […]
Seed dispersal is a critical ecological process with far-reaching implications. On rare occasions, seeds can be dispersed over vast distances, far beyond the range of the species. These events, known as long-distance dispersal, have profound evolutionary implications by expanding species distribution and triggering speciation. However, a comprehensive framework for understanding is still missing. In this […]
One of the main challenges of seed-based restoration is incorporating seeds from as wide a variety of species as possible. However, the seeds of some species have shapes or appendages that make it challenging to use specialized machinery for direct seeding, which hinders large-scale restoration projects and may lead to the exclusion of certain species. […]
There is a growing number of studies showing the effects of rising temperatures on different aspects of plant life cycles and ecological dynamics. However, little is known about how a warmer world would affect plants’ reproductive performance; in other words, how many resources they invest in reproduction and how many of these are translated into […]