News of two new journals. Although neither is strictly a botanical or plant science publication, they both cover plant science-relevant topics. First is The Cell Surface. Published by Elsevier, The Cell Surface “is a...
Category - Plant Cuttings
Nigel Chaffey
Raising awareness of plant blindness
Readers of this column will know that there is a problem with the inability – or unwillingness – of people generally to appreciate plants. This is the well-recognised phenomenon of plant blindness. Although we’ve talked...
New form of photosynthesis that’s above par
PAR is the acronym for Photosynthetically-Active Radiation, and refers to light with wavelengths of 400 – 700 nm, the so-called visible spectrum, from red to violet. PAR is photosynthetically-active because it...
A tiny silver bullet for cut flowers?
The cut flower industry – wherein stems of intact growing flowering plants are removed, and transported from their place of growth to a place of purchase by a customer and ultimately displayed in a vase (“a container...
Flowers (it’s what angiosperms are all about!)
Although one shouldn’t, it is easy to accept that flowers (the defining feature of the angiosperms, the flowering plants) are ‘just there’ and get on with life in their quiet, seemingly unremarkable way. If one...
When plant biology meets physics…
Great things are possible when disciplines that may be studied separately and distinctly are brought together. For example, and famously, when botany, zoology, bacteriology, mycology, protistology, virology, chemistry...
Inspiring the Botanists of the future
Part of the goal of Plant Cuttings items is to share news of botanical research with the wider plant-minded community, the better to advertise that wonderful example of human scientific endeavour. And that’s fine for...
Mouldy concrete is fit for purpose
When mould gets a grip on a building, it can hold it together.
Root hairs to halt global warming
Can plants help fight global warming? Nigel Chaffey looks to the roots.
Outer space comes to Cambridge
Some saxifrages are almost literally out of this world.
The increasingly fluid Silk Road
What would you imagine was carried along the Silk Road(s), that ancient route that connected the far-East to the near-East and Europe? Silks? Well, yes, and spices, etc. (and not forgetting traffic in infectious human...
Sustainable trees…
Not much of a story? Aren’t all trees sustainable [“avoiding depletion of natural resources”; “capable of being maintained at a steady level without exhausting natural resources or causing severe ecological...
Non-insect-eating insectivorous plant
Probably the one thing one could guess about an insectivorous plant is that it ‘eats’ insects. Take for example one of the most iconic entomophagous botanics of them all, the Venus fly-trap (Dionaea muscipula). The...
Octulose, about to get bigger?
What is octulose? And why is it about to be bigger? Well, according to Qingwei Zhang and Dorothea Bartels, it’s a “forgotten metabolite”. Yes, but what is it? Octulose is an 8-carbon sugar that occurs in plants...
