A sweet story: modern sugarcanes originate from three ancestral genomes
New study identifies hybridisation and backcrossing events to have led to the modern sugarcane cultivars.
Juniper Kiss
Juniper Kiss (@GOESbyJuniper) is currently a PhD student at the University of Southampton working on the "Enhancing ecosystem functioning to improve resilience of subsistence farming in Papua New Guinea" project.
As a marine biology turned plant biology undergraduate, she published student articles in GOES magazine and has been a big fan of social media, ecology, botany and fungi.
Along with blogging and posting, Juniper loves to travel to developing countries and working with farmers.
Pitfalls between fungus gnats and plant pitchers
Settling the debate: Plum ‘yews’ are in a separate family to yews
New genomic study assembled the plastid genomes of plum yews to understand their evolution.
Coffee and the Leaf Economics Spectrum: size matters
Martin and Issac quantified size-dependent variation in eight leaf traits in a single coffee genotype (Coffea arabica var. Caturra) in managed agroecosystems.
Fungal highways for P-solubilizing bacteria
New study in New Phytologist reveals that nutrient-solubilising bacteria can travel on fungi hyphae if the fungi provides a source of energy.
Living on the edge of fragmented forests: distance, insects and fungi impact plant traits
Seedling establishment is a crucial bottleneck in plant population dynamics, but seedlings don’t behave the same way fully-grown trees do.
Tea buds are prepared for the cold by remembering past weather
SoyFACE for 3D soybean canopy modelling under elevated carbon dioxide
New mathematical model dissects how soybean plants might grow larger in the future.
Global climate change and grasslands: soil microbial diversity to the rescue!
New study the journal New Phytologist reveals the importance of soil microbial diversity for tolerating or recovering from drought, warming and nitrogen deposition.
Very fine roots act as renewed carbon sink in rewetted peatland forest
New study suggests that rewetting peatland forests could increase their climate change mitigation function.
Lessons from Mediterranean olive domestication: keep wild relatives close by and do not “overselect”
New study in the journal BMC Biology found that Mediterranean olives have almost as high genetic diversity as olive cultivars
How do plants colonise new territories?
The research suggests that different categories of species have dissimilar seed germination niches, which contributes to explaining their coexistence.
Sunshine makes oats healthier
Study discovers the importance of light conditions and biosynthetic regulation of mixed-linkage glucan in oats.
Polyploid plants take a leaf out from the invasive species book
The extent to which propagule pressure limits the establishment of local polyploid populations remains to be determined, because we know so little.