Plants manage water stress through various mechanisms, including increasing concentrations of compounds such as abscisic acid (ABA) to signal stomatal closure and reduce water loss, changing plant secondary metabolite...
Tag - freeaccess
Danielle Marias
For one flower, bad hair days are the best days
If you want to please Leucospermum arenarium (Proteaceae) you’d better leave brushes and combs alone, as it has an unusual way to get pollinated. Plenty of plants are pollinated on the wind, or via currents in...
Alun Salt
We need Oddballs not Lunatics
Flipping through back issues of BioScience to see what’s now free access, I found an interesting editorial, Oddball Science: Why Studies of Unusual Evolutionary Phenomena Are Crucial. Science funding decisions are...
Botanists uncover the secrets of sexual attraction
An interesting paper has moved into free access in Annals of Botany: Caught in the act: pollination of sexually deceptive trap-flowers by fungus gnats in Pterostylis (Orchidaceae). It sounds like a very specific paper...
AmJBot explains Auxin to the perplexed
I’m delighted that there’s a review of Auxin in this month’s American Journal of Botany, Auxin activity: Past, present, and future by Enders and Strader. This might surprise a few of my friends as...
Why would a plant make its pollination less efficient?
The special issue on pollinator-driven speciation is available with free access now. We covered a few of the papers last year, but now they’re all free. One of the more puzzling papers is Novel adaptation to...
Snacking helps Drosera’s appetite
A paper by PavloviΔ et al. has caught my eye this week. Feeding on prey increases photosynthetic efficiency in the carnivorous sundew Drosera capensis has moved into Free Access. I’m used to the idea that...
Do changes in water levels in wetlands give plants a backbone?
The usual rule whenever a headline asks a silly question is that answer is no, and that’s the same here because plants don’t have backs. However research by Hamann and Puijalon does show that emergence due...
Can intensification be sustainable?
Contemporary interest in agricultural sustainability can be traced to environmental concerns that began to appear in the 1950s and 1960s. However, concepts and practices about sustainability date back at least to the...
Jules Pretty
The hidden cost of frankincense
A while back we covered a paper in Annals of Botany on tapping frankincense for resin. The mapping of the canals in the tree promised to improve the efficieny of tapping. Now in Tree Physiology Mengistu et al. have a...
It’s fruit Jim, but not as we know it
There’s an interesting paper we’ve just moved to free access: Gymnosperm B-sister genes may be involved in ovule/seed development and, in some species, in the growth of fleshy fruit-like structures by...
One plus one does not always make two, when plants add up costs and benefits
Mutualism is a relatively simple concept in plant science. Plants will reward other organisms that perform services for them, so both the plant and partner are better off then they would be alone. But what happens when...
Sweet nectar gives ferns a bitter taste
A collection of papers on Extrafloral Nectaries has recently moved into Free Access at Annals of Botany. One of the papers raises the question, can a plant that never flowers have extrafloral nectaries? Nectar secretion...
The ‘natural’ solution might not be best when your wildlife isn’t natural
Many ecosystems have been degraded or modified, and these are the sorts of systems you target for restoration. But when a system has been altered so much the original species might not be the best choice to bring it...
