A team of botanists in Japan have overturned decades-old assumptions about how cold stress leads to pollen sterility in rice.
Continue reading In cold weather, rice pollen suffers in a variety of ways as it struggles to develop
The mysterious and complex patterns on pollen walls may self-organise – and far earlier than expected.
Continue reading Research uncovers a gene that gives pollen grains their unique shapes
‘Two households, both alike in dignity’ is famously the opening line of Romeo & Juliet. How alike houses Montague and Capulet actually are is debatable, but what is clear is that plants with two households can be very different. Plants? Two households? What? Well, around 6% of plant species are dioecious (from the Greek for two houses or two households). This is to say that ‘male’ and ‘female’ sexual organs are split between different individuals, and there are therefore separate male and female plants. The comparative rarity of this in plants is in stark contrast to animals, the vast majority...
Continue reading ‘Two households, both alike …’? How differences between sexes varies with time in flowering plants
Male flowers of Aconitum protect their pollen by adding alkaloids. Without pollen as a reward, botanists asked how the flower compensated pollinators.
Continue reading Aconitum offers bees more nectar to carry its toxic pollen
Ant–plant associations are widely diverse and distributed throughout the world, leading to complex ecological networks. Regarding ant–plant mutualism, ant pollination is a very rare interaction and few studies have shown the role of ants as pollinators. Del-Claro et al. aimed to evaluate the role of ants as effective pollinators of Paepalanthus lundii (Eriocaulaceae) in a Brazilian savanna. The authors observed a relationship between seed production and ant visits; Camponotus crassus was the most frequent floral visitor and the most effective pollinator. Also, they observed a statistical difference between the numbers of male and female flowers produced, with a greater number...
Continue reading Ant pollination in Brazilian savanna
For many people, pollen means nose itching and eyes watering – but it is so much more. It is the reason we have food on our plates, and flowers around us. When pollen forms abnormally or degenerates, it is unable to generate new life through the production of a seed. Many factors can affect pollen development, and this is what my research is about.
Continue reading Researching Pollen Illuminating the Invisible
Dispersal is crucial due to its direct impact on dynamics of a species’ distribution as well as having a role in shaping adaptive potential through gene flow. In plants forming scarce and small populations, knowledge about the dispersal process is required to assess the potential for colonizing new habitats and connectivity of present and future populations. Using molecular data and the modelling approach, Chybicki and Oleksa estimate dispersal potential in Taxus baccata (Taxaceae), a dioecious tree with a highly fragmented distribution. They find that yew seeds travel shorter distances than pollen, facilitating a rapid development of a kinship structure within...
Continue reading Limited seed and pollen gene dispersal in Taxus baccata
The obturator bridges the downward transit of the pollen tube through style to ovary in many angiosperms. Examining pollen tube growth kinetics in the pistil in Malus × domestica and relating these to changes occurring on the obturator using histochemistry and immunocytochemistry in order to determine how the key access point of the obturator is mediated, Losada and Herrero show that glycoprotein secretion is required for a lightning pollen tube wall elongation on the surface of the obturator. This secretion is depleted following on from the passage of pollen tubes, which strongly suggests that glycoprotein secretion has a pivotal role...
Continue reading Glycoprotein secretions and pollen tube kinetics in apple
Flora Unveiled: The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants. Lincoln Taiz and Lee Taiz. Oxford University Press, 2017. Living in the 21st century with easy access to knowledge – and its various fake versions – on the internet and our seeming sophistication and all-knowingness, it’s hard to appreciate times gone by when we humans knew so much less. Take for instance the notion that plants engage in sexual reproduction. This truth seems so commonplace and widely known nowadays that to imagine a time when this was quite a heretical concept is almost unimaginable. But, that’s what Taiz and Taiz’s...
Continue reading The Sex Lives of Plants Laid Bare
This item concerns uses of botanical bits-and-pieces in ways that Nature never intended. But having also brought forth Man, that natural entity has given that creation’s ingenuity free rein and he has come up with some weird and wonderful reimaginings of botanical structures. Exhibit 1, pollen as a more environmentally-sympathetic alternative to graphite in lithium batteries. Environmental and health concerns about the use of lithium batteries aside (though they are numerous), if we’re going to have them, then we may as well make them as ‘green’ as we can. Currently [pun intended..?] such batteries use graphite as their anode, which...
Continue reading Botanotechnoinspirationals
In the mustard family, which includes the important crop Brassica (rapeseed/canola) and the model plant Arabidopsis, the surfaces of the female stigmatic cells are dry. These cells – on which the pollen grains land – are thought to be more advanced than those of the wet stigmas of many other plants because they do not trap fungal spores (or pollen grains of many other species), and can discriminate between self and cross pollen of their own species and thus avoid self-pollination. The evolution of these stigmas has, however, involved the development of a good deal of complex cell biology –...
Continue reading Hanging On To Your Date, Avoiding Incest And Not Getting Infected – All In A Day’s Work For Flowers Of The Mustard Family
The widespread tendency towards declining fruit set from first to last flowers on plants may contribute to temporal variation in allocation optima.
Continue reading Temporal variation in gender in an annual plant
There’s an insufficiency of people to grow the new crops that aren’t being identified because of the dearth of plant taxonomists. Where will it all end..?
Continue reading Cause for optimism (maybe not…)
Kron et al. use flow cytometry to characterize pollen loads from individual bees, using DNA content as a species marker,
Continue reading Flow cytometric analysis of bee pollen loadsBotany 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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