Tersonia cyathiflora (Gyrostemonaceae) is a fire ephemeral with an obligate requirement for smoke to germinate. Downes et al. (pp. 381–384) find that this species does not respond to a butenolide from smoke that...
Category - News
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
Leaf functional traits of invasive and native woody vines
Success of invasive plant species is thought to be linked with their higher leaf carbon fixation strategy. Osunkoya et al. (pp. 371–380) show that there is limited difference in trait plasticity between exotic invasive...
Effects of defoliation on a monoecious plant
Monoecy is a relatively flexible sexual system that can be advantageous against environmental stresses such as leaf herbivory. Narbona and Dirzo (pp. 359–369) examine the effects of experimental defoliation on male and...
Sense and sensibility to sex and sustainability
Two-thirds of the energy in the food we eat comes from seeds – including wheat, rice, maize, oilseeds – and their associated storage structures as fruits. Without seeds, the direct product of sexual...
Bacteria and plants entangled in Research Blogging
There’s been a couple of posts on Research Blogging that have caught my eye in the past couple of days. Both of them are interesting because they show how important studying interaction is to understand the...
Alun Salt
Phylogeography and acquisition of dioecy in Malvaceae
In the Mascarenes, a young oceanic archipelago, the Dombeyoideae have extensively diversified and have evolved specific breeding systems compared to the continental species. By constructing a molecular phylogeny, Le...
Hydraulic connections in leaves and fruit of pepper
Are there similarities in changes in xylem functionality between maturing fruit and abscising leaves? Trifilò et al. (pp. 333–341) make simultaneous hydraulic measurements on leaves and fruit of Capsicum frutescens at...
Carnivorous plants prefer to kill in broad daylight
I owe thanks to Dr Andrej Pavlovič for being a patient guinea pig with my first press-release (you can find it on Science Daily) and to Lizzie Shannon-Little at OUP for helping put it out. It’s good timing because...
Style polymorphism in Nivenia (Iridaceae)
Heterostyly is widely distributed among the angiosperms, but detailed studies are limited to few taxonomic groups. Sánchez et al. (pp. 321–331) ascertain the presence of different stigma height polymorphisms among...
Windows of opportunity in embryo development
Variation in mature seed size is the result of a complex array of interactions involving genes, genomes and environment that may change during development. Diggle et al. (pp. 309–319) study the dynamics of embryo and...
Growth–differentiation balance in stressed juvenile plants
The growth–differentiation balance hypothesis states that there is a physiological trade-off between growth and secondary metabolism. Cella Pizarro and Bisigato (pp. 297–307) investigate the response of six species...
Gene dispersal in wild carrot populations
How far can a gene disperse? Historical and contemporary gene dispersal can be estimated from spatial genetic structure and paternity analysis, and Rong et al. (pp. 285–296) find that an estimate of gene flow in Daucus...
botanyone
The waste of what we do?
Many of us involved in plant sciences are looking at ways to improve crop productivity by 5%, 7% or maybe even 10%. Although not focusing on the details of plant breeding, Annals of Botany has numerous papers on...
Oxygen transport via aerenchyma in soybean
When in flooded soil, soybean, Glycine max, produces aerenchyma and hypertrophic stem lenticels. Shimamura et al. (pp. 277–284) investigate the oxygen dynamics in these tissues and find that hypertrophic lenticels on...
