Some plants have pairs of chromosomes, theyβre diploid organisms like us. Other plants have more than two copies of chromosomes, theyβre polyploid. Strawberries can even be octoploid. Mosses can be polyploid too, but a...
Being rooted, plants have very little opportunity to travel. They can as pollen to find a mate, and also as seeds. In the case of Cardamine hirsuta, that travel is explosive. The plant stores energy in the pericarp of...
How does a plant sense stress and pass those signals around its body? Corentin Dourmap and colleagues have reviewed the role of mitochondria in the plant cell and how they interact with stress signalling. Image: Canva...
Growing a fruit is only one way of passing your genes on to the next generation if you’re a plant. You could also send pollen to another plant. But what factors influence siring success? Dorothy Christopher and...
In southeast China there is a puzzle. Pseudotaxus chienii lives as a relict, a plant that used to have a much wider geographic range. Now itβs limited to comparatively few locations. This is common for many plants that...
We know that maize roots chase after phosphorus, but how? Xin Wang and colleagues have been investigating what purpose the hormone auxin has in controlling root proliferation. Their work could help better understand how...
Trees need nitrogen. When they shed leaves with all the nitrogen in them it would be a big loss, were it not for the army of creepy-crawlies that recycle the leaves back into the soil. Life is tougher for mangroves. At...
Plants usually have limited resources in one way or another. There is only so much nutrient in the soil. How best to use it? The plant economics spectrum theory integrates the coordination of plant functional traits...
Did the Cyatheaceae become such a diverse family slowly over time, or in spurts? The largest molecular sampling yet points to gradual accumulation of species.