Tag: Botany

Many fungi are pathogens that kill or weaken their plant hosts. However, there are also many species that form beneficial relationships with plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. One of these mutualisms is the mycorrhizal association between a fungus and a plant root, where the fungus provides the plant…

Are you curious about why and how angiosperms, flowering plants, are the youngest lineage of land plants and have become the most abundant group of plants? You are not alone. Generations of botanists and evolutionary biologists have wondered about this same thing. Many questions have been answered, such…

Nobody doubts the great insights we have gained about plant diversity and evolution from genome sequencing, but the patchy nature of available genomes within the plant phylogeny remains a problem. Cheng et al. describe the 10KP (10,000 Plants) Genome Sequencing Project, which aims to sequence genomes…

Lichen are quite special, as they don’t exist independently of their partnership.  Lichen are composed of a fungal partner and a photosynthetic partner (the algal or cyanobacterial photobiont), and these partnerships have evolved independently many times.  Spribille provides an overview of some of…

Du et al. investigate an important protein that regulates photosynthesis under stress. Plant Cell. https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.17.00446.                                                                               Background:…

Cai et al. investigate the function of a Medicago truncatula enzyme (MtNFH1) that cleaves nodulation signals of symbiotic Sinorhizobium meliloti bacteria. Plant Cell (2018). https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.17.00420. By Jie Cai, Zhi-Ping Xie and Christian Staehelin Background: Nitrogen-fixing rhizobia…

Roots differ in their form and function, as they need to compete for water and nutrients in the wide range of environment. Although we are starting to understand some adaptive aspects of individual root morphology features, the adaptive features of root organization are still poorly understood. Ma and…

Cataloguing of American plants started in the year 1526 with the chronicles by Fernandez de Oviedo that already included the first reports of now widely use crops such as chili pepper and corn. Ulloa-Ulloa et al. present in this article a complete and searchable checklist (large PDF) of all known American…