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...
Category - News
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
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...
Factors leading to hybrid lethality in Nicotiana
Hybrid lethality is a type of postzygotic isolation and is observed in some species of Nicotiana in association with genes encoded on the Q chromosome. Tezuka et al. (pp. 267–276) make interspecific crosses of eight...
Flower unisexuality in dioecious date palm
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...
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...
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