A positive plethora of plant papers!

Unusually for this column (why give the ‘competition’ a free bit of publicity, after all?), I here wish to promote The Scientist magazine. As a general science news item site it occasionally features plant-related items, but it has surpassed itself with its 1st January 2014 collection. Not only does it feature a wonderful image of the fruit of the lotus plant on its cover, but it also contains four big plant articles(!).

By way of introducing that compilation, Mary Aberlin observes in her editorial that, ‘the panoply of fictional plants offers a large and varied dose of the weird and wonderful. But there’s no need to resort to fiction to find truly unusual plant characteristics’… so, read on! Accordingly, the selection comprises an item by Abby Olena that considers halotropism, a newly identified tropism in roots. This showcases a study by Carlos Galvan-Ampudia et al. that demonstrates active growth of roots of several plant species away from sites of high salt content, and which is not gravitropism. This work begs the question of how many other tropisms might still await discovery in that understudied plant organ.

In ‘Green gold’ Tracy Vence reports on the discovery of gold bioaccumulation in eucalyptus leaves, which was covered on this very blog not so long ago. Megan Scudellari’s article begins by posing the question, ‘What do cells, genes, mutations, transposons, RNA silencing, and DNA recombination have in common?’: the answer – but, of course! – is that all were first discovered in plants; she then considers how plant DNA is challenging preconceptions about the evolution of life (including our own species). And Dan Cossins considers the question of whether plants ‘talk’ to each other. Reviewing a wide-ranging body of work, the conclusion is that plants do communicate and interact with each other, both above and below ground, in surprisingly subtle and sophisticated ways. And by way of demonstrating how the time is right for certain ideas, Kat McGowan has an item in Quanta Magazine on ‘The secret language of plants’.  Almost inevitably these sorts of articles raise the spectre of how intelligent plants are, and that issue is given a good airing in Michael Pollan’s New Yorker article. What a great botanical start to the New Year (which traditionally starts on 10th April…)!