Pacaya palm (Chamaedorea tepejilote) is a plant eaten in Guatemala and Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras. It’s cultivated, but not intensively. Hanene Hosni and colleagues examined how the domesticated pacaya palm...
Tag - Arecaceae
Fi Gennu
Tropical islands lead to more diversity in Palm sexual reproduction
Isolation and sexual adaptability contributed to the evolution of thousands of palm species.
Juniper Kiss
A diversity of lipid composition in the seeds and fruits of the palm family
Palms are vitally important due to their high vegetable oil production, which can occur in both fruits and seeds. The full range of lipid storage and composition, however, hasn’t been well understood across this large...
Erin Zimmerman
Palms show huge variation in their resistance to drought-induced embolism
This study represents the first estimate of drought-induced xylem embolism in palms across biomes and provides the first step towards understanding hydraulic adaptations in long-lived arborescent monocots.
Soil fertility and flood regime are correlated with phylogenetic structure of Amazonian palm communities
Identifying the processes that generate and maintain biodiversity requires understanding of how evolutionary processes interact with abiotic conditions to structure communities. Edaphic gradients are strongly associated...
Alex Assiry
Plant-animal interactions deal with wildfires in unexpected ways
A guest post by Yedra García, María Clara Castellanos and Juli G. Pausas Wildfires might seem like dramatic events, even in ecosystems where they are fully natural. Yet plants and animals have evolved all sorts of...
Guest Author
Genetic structure of Old World date palm
Population structure analysis reveals the existence of two ancient gene pools that have contributed to the current diversity of Old World date palm.
botanyone
Straightening out the Palmaceae
As one of the most obvious indications of growth, you might have thought that there was little new to discover about increase in length of plant stems. Wrong! Studying growth in Iriartea deltoidea (Arecaceae), Heidi...
Nigel Chaffey
Pollination mechanisms in palms (Review)
Understanding of palm–pollinator interactions has implications for tropical silviculture, as well as for our knowledge of the evolution and diversification of Arecaceae. Barfod et al. review 25 years of progress in palm...
Single-copy nuclear genes for palm phylogenetics
Molecular phylogenetic studies of palms (Arecaceae) have not yet provided a fully resolved phylogeny of the family. Ludeña et al. test the value of AGAMOUS 1 and PHYTOCHROME B genes as new nuclear markers to improve...
DNA barcoding: a new tool for palm taxonomists?
Although taxonomy of palms (Arecaceae) is fairly well known, many problems remain and this is, in part, due to the difficultly of representing palm diversity with herbarium specimens. For the first time in Arecaceae...
Geographical ecology of the palms (Review)
Palms (Arecaceae) are an important element of tropical vegetation across the world and serve as a model system in geographical ecology.Eiserhardt et al. review how the abiotic environment, biotic interactions and...
Phylogeny of arecoid palms
The Arecoideae is the largest, most diverse and most economically important palm subfamily and yet relationships within the group are poorly understood. Baker et al. collect nuclear DNA sequence data for the low-copy...
