Seed germination is a critical step in the life cycle of flowering plants. Since seeds contain limited reserves, seed germination has to be tightly regulated to ensure that germination takes place in a suitable...
Large-scale environmental changes such as aridification have shaped and continue to influence the evolution and composition of biomes. As conditions change, organisms may persist in some parts of their ranges, become...
Although leaf wilt occurred in both water stress and FOC infection, the physiological responses were different, especially in leaf spatial distribution.
Rice (Oryza sativa) leaf blades possess lobed mesophyll cells with intricate cell boundaries. Their sub-cellular structure has been observed with transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of thin sections, but the whole...
Why can you find colourful plants, where they're hardest to see? Iridoplasts, an overlooked plastid, improve photosynthesis and look great while doing it.
Miscanthus is a genus of C4 perennial East Asian grasses that is emerging as a leading bioenergy crop. Clark et al. collected germplasm of M. sacchariflorus and M. sinensis in the Russian Far East, at the northern...
Although a few plant lineages have lost one copy of the plastid genome (plastome) inverted repeat (IR), its near ubiquity among streptophytes has fostered speculation about its functional role and consequent...
Taken at face value that is a pretty daft question. After all, it is well known that chloroplasts are for photosynthesis. True, but what about the chloroplasts in the guard cells (GCCs) of stomata? Chloroplasts in those...
Condensed tannins (proanthocyanidins) are widely distributed amongst the vascular plants (Tracheophyta). Brillouet et al. use a variety of techniques to examine tannin-rich samples from various organs across a wide...
It is widely acknowledged that eukaryotic cells (you know, the ones with a membrane-bound nucleus and a variety of other membrane-bound organelles (cf. prokaryotes)) came to be so complex by a series of ‘mergers and...