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.
Tag - hemicellulose
botanyone
Food that really might taste like sawdust
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...
Nigel Chaffey
Creative Destruction: How Death Leads to Function
Marcos Buckeridge explains how death and destruction in sugarcane roots can lead to the development of gas spaces, which improve root function.
Guest Author
Dragons, coconuts and skyscrapers…
Botanists aren't always genetic engineers. This week Nigel Chaffey finds some have branched out into civil engineering.
Hemicellulose evolution in monilophytes (Research in Context)
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...
Functional approach to predicting root decomposition
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...
