What is it that makes a plant get up and stay up? A new review looks at the creation of secondary cell walls. These microscopic features are the key to understanding the architecture of the plants we see around us.
Continue reading The cell biology of secondary cell wall biosynthesis
A common complaint of food, for many reasons, is that it ‘tastes like sawdust’. Although that description is subjective – the food doesn’t contain sawdust even if its taste may suggest otherwise,* there may be more than a grain of truth in it in the near future, if Luke’s dream comes to pass. Who is Luke? And what is his vision? First, Luke isn’t a ‘who’, but a ‘what’; Luke is the acronym for the Natural Resources Institute Finland,** which aims to ‘provide new solutions towards the sustainable development of the Finnish bioeconomy and the promotion of new biobased businesses’....
Continue reading Food that really might taste like sawdust
Marcos Buckeridge explains how death and destruction in sugarcane roots can lead to the development of gas spaces, which improve root function.
Continue reading Creative Destruction: How Death Leads to Function
Botanists aren’t always genetic engineers. This week Nigel Chaffey finds some have branched out into civil engineering.
Continue reading Dragons, coconuts and skyscrapers…
The Equisetopsida emerged in the Upper Devonian (>370 mya), and Equisetum (horsetails) may be the oldest surviving vascular plant genus. Horsetails and the Poales are the only plants possessing the hemicellulose (1->3, 1->4)-b-d-glucan (MLG). Xue and Fry show that variation has occurred in MLG structure during horsetail diversification, and that E. bogotense (the earliest-diverging species) has MLG composed almost solely of an ancestral tetrasaccharide repeat-unit, G4G4G3G, whereas other species in both subgenera (Equisetum and Hippochaete) have additional di- and trisaccharide repeats. Quantitatively, xyloglucan is down-played in monilophyte species rich in MLG or mannans. They conclude that plants have ‘experimented’ extensively with hemicellulose...
Continue reading Hemicellulose evolution in monilophytes (Research in Context)
Much of plant biomass is in roots but we know much less about root properties that affect decomposition rates than we do about above-ground tissues. Aulen and Shipley measure decomposition rates of 17 species of trees and herbs using intact soil cores in the field and relate the differences to root chemical and morphological properties. They find that initial root traits account for 75 % of variation in interspecific decomposition rates, and may thus provide a relatively simple way of assessing root turnover.
Continue reading Functional approach to predicting root decompositionBotany One is a blog run by the Annals of Botany Company, a non-profit educational charity.
In addition to Botany One, the company currently publishes three journals, the Annals of Botany, AoB PLANTS, and in silico Plants.
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