Plants that have grown in partnership with human activity in meadows can be a great source of seeds for restoration projects, but their ability to germinate is also a problem.
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...
A guest post by Debarati Chakraborty The power of aroma compounds to offer physical, mental and spiritual delight is one of the oldest enchanting tales. Aroma stimulates the limbic system, one of the primitive parts of...
Botanists find a clear trade-off between fruit size and phytochemical production, helping to explain why our modern varieties are highly susceptible to diseases and pests.
Crop wild relatives are important genetic resources for crop improvement, but they can also be candidates for crop domestication. Zizania latifolia is a perennial aquatic grass which was domesticated as a vegetable crop...
List books can be good, but there’s a knack to them. Nick Lane’s Life Ascending works because the various features to life he lists come together to build a bigger story. The list is secondary to the story...
The study of plant evolution and development in a phylogenetic context has accelerated research advances in both areas over the last decade. The addition of a robust phylogeny for virtually all plant taxa based on DNA...
Edible banana varieties underwent a series of bottlenecks during their evolution and domestication, resulting in a number of original genotypes that diversified clonally. Sardos et al. have genotyped more than 500...