If you're looking for biodiversity, one good place to start is an unexpectedly harsh environment.
Category - Featured
Alun Salt
What a plant learns. The curious case of Mimosa pudica.
Can a plant learn? Drawing on recent and forthcoming research, Monica Gagliano and Michael Marder suggest that we should be rethinking what intelligence is.
Monica Gagliano
Taking a close look at the mystery of the disappearing petals
How do flowers develop? This is a puzzle tackled by Wei Lai and Louis Ronse de Craene in their paper What is the nature of petals in Caryophyllaceae? Developmental evidence clarifies their evolutionary origin. In it...
How does mixed mating persist, when self-pollination ensures a plant won’t reproduce?
Being a seed from self-pollination guarantees failure in Eucalyptus regnans. Yet despite this, new research shows a mixed-mating system. including selfing, is evolutionarily stable.
Climate Change and Carbon Sequestration in Soils: Can Phytoliths Help?
In October 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its report on the feasibility of us keeping under the 1.5°C target suggested by the United Nations at the Paris climate change meeting in...
Martin Hodson
When a plant loses photosynthesis, what else does it lose?
One of the common features of plants they make their own food. But what happens inside a plant when they stop making their food and eat something else?
How to break down cell walls in sugarcane
One way of improving the usefulness of a plant crop might come not from studying where the plant cells grow, but where they die.
Salicylic acid-independent responses in PI4K mutants
Arabidopsis thaliana is the lab rat of plant sciences. Mutants tweaked in certain genes can show the effects of hormones on plants, but it can be hard to change one response without changing some others. How do plants...
A new code to decipher phytoliths
Plants don’t have skeletons, but they still have a mineral component in them. Inside plants you can find phytoliths, microscopic mineral deposits that a plant forms from silica. Because these are mineral, when a...
BLINKing stomata: an optogenetic approach to improve plant growth and water use
Photosynthesis needs water. Guest blogger Maria Papanatsiou has a new way of increasing water efficiency in plants, enabling them to do more with less.
Guest Author
The poorly known Ethiopian crop Enset
Enset, a relative of the banana, provides the staple food for around 20 million Ethiopians, yet is barely known outside of the region.
How Dracula orchids lure flies for pollination
With over 28000 species of orchid, it seems like there's an orchid for every niche. The Dracula orchid's niche is mimicking a mushroom.
What experience has had the biggest impact on your career?
We asked the members of the in silico Plants editorial board about the experience that has had the biggest impact on their career. This is what they said: A key moment was attending the ‘Mathematical modelling of...
Rachel Shekar
Thermal Ecology to become a hot topic
We might think of flowers in terms of their colour and scent, but what about their temperature? A new review in Annals of Botany looks at the thermal ecology of flowers. In the paper Casper van der Kooi and colleagues...
