Plants in over 100 families bear extrafloral nectaries (EFNs), which secrete a carbohydrate-rich food that attracts ants and other arthropods. By fostering ecologically important protective mutualisms, EFNs play a...
Tag - angiosperms
botanyone
Fire
Picking up on my elemental theme, fire has long been considered a major influence on evolution of the angiosperms, whether natural or anthropogenic conflagrations. This incendiary interaction has not been helped by...
Nigel Chaffey
DNA content for 407 plant species from the USA
The genome sizes of plants represent a key character often associated with other traits. Bai et al. use flow cytometry to provide prime C-values for 514 taxa. Most of these (407) are new reports, including 129 genera...
Evolution of AGPase duplicates
ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (AGPase), a key enzyme in starch biosynthesis, is comprised of large (LSU) and small (SSU) sub-units encoded by multiple paralogous genes in angiosperms. Corbi et al. investigate the...
Love and Flowers: When analogies break down
I’ve learned a lot from a new article in AoB PLANTS, the Open Access sister Journal to Annals of Botany. It’s Green love talks; Cell-cell communication during double-fertilization in flowering plants by...
Alun Salt