A polysaccharide found in the cell walls of land plants has now been found outside the cell. This chemical, Xyloglucan, could be one of clues as to how plants moved onto land.
Category - Articles
Alun Salt
Plant defences can be overwhelmed by a snail’s sweet tooth
Building up toxic metals in the leaves won't deter snails from taking a nibble, if the leaf is sweet enough.
Amaranthus tricolor: eat your greens (and reds and purples)
While leafy green vegetables are wilting under the summer heatwave, the drought and heat tolerant leafy vegetable, amaranth, provides a nutritious alternative.
Rachael Symonds
Plant-animal interactions deal with wildfires in unexpected ways
A guest post by Yedra García, María Clara Castellanos and Juli G. Pausas Wildfires might seem like dramatic events, even in ecosystems where they are fully natural. Yet plants and animals have evolved all sorts of...
Guest Author
Bibliometrics of Biofortification
Biofortification is a growing field of research. Philip White dives into the bibliometrics to see what nutrients and what crops are of particular interest at the moment.
Philip White
Exquisitely preserved tiny fossils are key for understanding moss evolution
Tiny 135-million-year-old moss fossils found in rocks from western Canada preserve exquisite anatomical details. These fossils open an unexpected window on moss evolution, as they allow for recognition of living moss...
Alexandru M.F. (Mihai) Tomescu
On nectaries and floral architecture
Nectaries are the most interesting organs in flowers – at least to me. Compared to other floral organs (i.e. perianth organs, stamens and carpels), the position of nectaries is not necessarily fixed within the floral...
Julius Jeiter
Elevated carbon dioxide: Getting to the root of the problem
How will plants respond to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere? Botanists at BIFoR, the Birmingham Institute for Forest Research have gone underground to find some of the answers.
Contemporary Citation Classic: Flowers TJ (2004) Improving crop salt tolerance. Journal of Experimental Botany 55, 307-319.
Philip White writes: Recently, I compiled a list of contemporary Citation Classics in Plant Sciences. My intention was not just to identify key papers in Plant Sciences but also to discover something about the...
An orchid matches its scent emission rhythm to the local pollinators
Some flowers only smell at day and some only at night, but how did they evolve these different rhythms? In our study, we investigate if populations of the same orchid species that are more pollinated either at day or at...
Elodie Chapurlat
Amazing moss and how to identify it
If I told you that during a 200m walk down a suburban London street I saw 13 different species from one group of organisms, you might struggle to imagine what I could have seen. You’d probably be even more surprised to...
Emily Warner
Do Oaks Encourage the Baby-Eating Chipmunks of China?
You might expect acorn-eating chipmunks to be the enemies of oaks. New research out of Henan and Jiangxi suggests that the chipmunks aid oaks because acorns are not the only babies that the chipmunks eat.
What can you do with a holobiont?
It's said all plants are holobionts. If that's true why bother creating a new word? What value does the word holobiont bring that plant doesn't already have?
Silicon: the underappreciated plant nutrient
What nutrients do you consider to be important to a plant? What do plants need to be successful, to grow, photosynthesise, develop and defend themselves effectively against pests and disease? The majority of people...
Adam Frew