Museomic approaches are employed in order to establish an evolutionary, palaeoecological, and biogeographic context for radially symmetrical, five-winged fossil fruits from the highly diverse early Eocene Laguna del...
Tag - openaccess
botanyone
DArT whole genome profiling and evolution of edible banana
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...
Could drought stress in trees affect air quality?
With climate change, trees will experience an increased frequency of stress events (i.e. drought, heat stress) causing both direct effects (e.g. CO2 uptake through photosynthesis) and indirect effects (e.g. isoprenoid...
Joseph Stinziano
All is number? A faster way to analyse plant root images
A paper in JXB offers new way to analyse root networks. Reducing a root system to a graph might look like a step away from reality, but it allows for a lot of rapid high-quantity analysis of root systems.
Alun Salt
Are all plant pollinators as busy as a bee?
There’s an article recently published in Psyche, that might be of interest to botanists Busy Bees: Variation in Insect Flower-Visiting Rates across Multiple Plant Species. It’s not a surprise that there are...
Biodiversity flourishes in an ancient rubbish tip
The preservation of archeological sites does not always overlap with the conservation of biodiversity. At the most basic level, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization separates cultural...
The most efficient trap isn’t always the most deadly trap
Pitchers plants are carnivorous. They catch small animals, usually insects to gain nutrients like Nitrogen. You’d expect that they’d evolve their traps to be as effective as possible. If an insect gets away...
Deadly competition between parasites
There’s an interesting paper out in Nature Communications: Coinfection alters population dynamics of infectious disease. The paper is the study of Plantago lanceolata a common weed where I live in the UK...
Where did your cells come from?
Where did your complex cells come from? A new model literally turns an old theory inside out.
Laughing gas no laughing matter for climate change
There’s an interesting article published in PLOS One that I like. It’s one of these things that’s very clever, but the basic idea is very simple. Temperatures are rising, and there’s plenty of...
How important is gene flow?
There’s a handy article available from the American Journal of Botany that’s caught my eye: Is gene flow the most important evolutionary force in plants? by Norman C. Ellestrand. It opens with a strong...
More bad news for bees, now plant viruses are after them
Colony Collapse Disorder is bad news, even if you hate honey as much as I do. Disappear honey bees doesn’t just mean less honey, they pollinate many plants. The value of honey bee pollination is billions of...
Are tomatoes naturally unnatural?
The news GM Tomatoes are being grown in Canada broke on the BBC late last week. They also opened a comment section which, like comments sections on any news site, is a mix of the thoughtful and bizarre. One common...
Half measures don’t work when restoring marine forests
Would you recognise a desert if it was covered in water? What I mean by that is if somewhere that should be covered in forest were barren and empty, would you notice? A paper in PLOS One outlines why it matters...
