Tag: Botany

Parasitic plants draw nutrients from their hosts. Spallek et al. explored the molecular interaction between the parasitic plant Phtheirospermum japonicum (in the Orobranchaceae family) and the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. They demonstrated movement of tracers from the host to the parasite through…

Chromosomal inversions are chromosomal rearrangements that can span several Mb and have been described in several organisms from Drosophila to maize. Inversions suppress recombination and can favor local adaptation and speciation if they capture favorable alleles. It’s not clear though if favorable…

Environmental changes affect the biodiversity (variety of life forms) and productivity (conversion of sunlight energy and carbon into plant biomass) of ecological communities. The collaborative Nutrient Network (NutNet) was created 10 years ago with the goal of synthesizing studies of ecosystem environmental…

Phytochromes were first characterized in classic studies of plants, in which their contributions to seed germination and initiation of flowering were described. Subsequently, phytochromes were identified in cyanobacteria and in non-photosynthetic organisms including fungi. Rockwell and Lagarias review…

The ancestors of land plants were aquatic. Myriad changes accompanied the transition from aquatic to terrestrial life, including changes necessitated by the difference in light intensity and quality. Bryophytes, the earliest diverging land plants, have some characteristics that reveal how plants transitioned…

It is well established that plastids are derived from the primary endosymbiosis of an ancient cyanobacterium into a eukaryotic host cell, but this understanding does not explain all of the evidence, nor does it explain how the nascent endosymbiont evaded the host cell's defense mechanisms. Recently,…

Pollination is an important evolutionary process as it allows gene flow. If pollen travels long distances, the likelihood of inbreeding is reduced and fitness may be increased. Pollen dispersal can be assisted by pollinators, and although most plants are pollinated by insects, birds are also important…

Sentience, the capacity to feel subjectively, is considered limited to organisms that have a nervous system and a centralized brain. Plants, therefore, have been excluded from this group based on: lack of a transmission mechanism like the animal nervous system; lack of a brain; simplicity; and inability…