A team of botanists in Japan have overturned decades-old assumptions about how cold stress leads to pollen sterility in rice.
Tag - pollen
Alun Salt
Research uncovers a gene that gives pollen grains their unique shapes
The mysterious and complex patterns on pollen walls may self-organise – and far earlier than expected.
Hugh Dickinson
‘Two households, both alike …’? How differences between sexes varies with time in flowering plants
‘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...
Liam Elliott
Aconitum offers bees more nectar to carry its toxic pollen
Male flowers of Aconitum protect their pollen by adding alkaloids. Without pollen as a reward, botanists asked how the flower compensated pollinators.
Dale Maylea
Ant pollination in Brazilian savanna
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...
Alex Assiry
Researching Pollen Illuminating the Invisible
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...
Alison Tidy
Limited seed and pollen gene dispersal in Taxus baccata
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...
Glycoprotein secretions and pollen tube kinetics in apple
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...
botanyone
The Sex Lives of Plants Laid Bare
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...
Nigel Chaffey
Botanotechnoinspirationals
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...
Hanging On To Your Date, Avoiding Incest And Not Getting Infected – All In A Day’s Work For Flowers Of The Mustard Family
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...
Temporal variation in gender in an annual plant
The widespread tendency towards declining fruit set from first to last flowers on plants may contribute to temporal variation in allocation optima.
Cause for optimism (maybe not…)
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..?
Flow cytometric analysis of bee pollen loads
Kron et al. use flow cytometry to characterize pollen loads from individual bees, using DNA content as a species marker,
