Dioecy has evolved independently several times during the evolution of flowering plants, but knowledge of the mechanisms involved is poor. Phoenix dactylifera is a dioecious species displaying strong dimorphism between...
Category - News
botanyone
Great Escapes – continued
There is another way to think of plant escapes: when I lived at Kew, there was a story about ‘bid for freedom of plants from Kew’ – Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum), growing up to 7m tall, had...
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
Genetic structuring in a large population of Arabidopsis
The perennial Arabidopsis lyrata is able to propagate both sexually and asexually, and this is expected to influence spatial genetic structure in the species. A fine-scale molecular study by Lundemo et al. (pp. 243–254)...
Hourglass cell development in soybean seed coat
Hourglass cells (HGC) are prominent cells in the legume seed coat. Miller et al. (pp. 235–242) document HGC development in soybean, Glycine max, and relate structural changes to expression of an HGC-specific soybean...
Even plants can have too much of a good thing
No doubt this will horrify Pat, but this is one of my favourite YouTube videos. If you’ve ever expressed a doubt about something, only to be told it must be ok because it’s natural, this is the video for you...
Alun Salt
Foresight, hindsight and biodiversity
I was looking at the downloads of papers from Annals of Botany over the last year. In the top ten of most downloaded papers was one from 1997 (certainly when I relied on photocopiers rather than PDFs). It was on the...
Moving beyond the ‘One-dinosaur-fits-all’ model of science communication
Alice Bell has written a couple of provocative posts on science communication at the Guardian and on her own blog recently. The spark is what the current science minister sees as the salvation of the sciences. Space and...
It’s an ill wind …?
Wood (aka ‘the really hard stuff inside trees’) is as ancient a building material and engineering solution as they come, but new uses are still being found for timber in the most unlikely of applications. Take for...
Nigel Chaffey
Spring temperatures affect season-long growth in grapevine
Vitis vinifera Plant growth is commonly understood to be determined by current temperature. Using a free-air cooling and heating system in the field, Keller and Tarara (pp. 131–141) show that much of the seasonal...
Spikelet seed position-dependent effects on life history
Eremopyrum distans The cold desert annual grass Eremopyrum distans exhibits position-dependent effects of seeds in the spikelet. Wang et al. (pp. 95–105) find that seeds from three positions in a spikelet differ in...
Phylogeny and diversification of Myrtaceae
Fleshy fruits have evolved independently several times amongst Myrtaceae. Using a family-wide phylogeny, Biffin et al. (pp. 79–93) find that the parallel evolution of fleshy fruit was accompanied by a positive shift in...
Regulation of tillering in sorghum: genotypic effects
Tillering is generally recognized as one of the most plastic traits affecting accumulation of biomass and ultimately grain yield in many field crops. Kim et al. (pp. 69–78) study five hybrids of Sorghum bicolor, derived...
Regulation of tillering in sorghum: environmental effects
Tillering has a significant effect on canopy development, resource capture, crop growth, and grain yield in cereal crops. Kim et al. conduct a series of field and laboratory experiments to determine the effects of...
