Tag: Botany

One of the biggest challenges when using fossils in plant evolution studies is establishing the phylogenetic relationships between fossils and modern plants. This task is particularly complicated with fossils from flowers or fruits, given the little information available for most groups' reproductive…

Succulence provides plants with the ability to store water and is therefore commonly associated with plants from arid environments such as the familiar Aloe and Agave. Here, Heyduk reviews the genetic control of leaf succulence. Succulence usually involves large, highly vacuolated cells, but not surprisingly,…

If there is one thing we agree on, it is that plants are underappreciated, leading to consequences spanning from ecosystem collapse to poor rates of funding. This effect, and efforts to remedy it, have been discussed in terms of “plant blindness”. In this Perspective, Parsley summarizes many…

Seeds can be dispersed in space (i.e., away from their mother plants) or time (i.e., delayed germination via seed dormancy or persistent soil seed banks). These contrasting strategies have traditionally been considered to increase reproductive success, but our understanding of their relationship is…

Over the past decade, Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has been used for de novo assembly of crop genomes (i.e., tomato, potato) under the motto “If it tastes good, let’s sequence it”. By contrast, the One Thousand Plant (1KP) Initiative set out to obtain transcriptomic data of phylogenetically…

With a collaborative effort by multiple laboratories across the world, a database of transcriptomics data has been generated for 1124 species encompassing green plants, glaucophytes, and red algae. This extensive work referred to as onekp (one thousand plant transcriptomes) will aid in researchers to…

Grasses scatter their seeds through the process of cell abscission. Losing this trait, in a process known as loss of shattering, was an early step in the domestication of cereals. Interestingly, the abscission zone (AZ) is positionally and morphologically different in different cereals. In order to understand…

Cyanobacteria are important contributors to global carbon fixation. They can be free-living in many different environments, but also form close symbiotic associations with various eukaryotic organisms. Nakayama et al. have idea identified a new type of cyanobacteria that lives as an ectosymbiont in a…