When humans selected for bigger seeds in maize, they may have also unintentionally improved its root system.
Continue reading Seminal roots help maize grab nutrients
New research finds that root capturing more nutrients could help wildlife breathe many miles away.
Continue reading Improving roots for crops could improve habitats for wildlife
The two adaptations both aid in nutrient uptake, but may work against each other
Continue reading When phosphorus levels are low, mycorrhizae outcompete root hairs in maize
How have the roots of maize changed since the introduction of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser in the 1940s?
Continue reading Has agricultural intensification impacted maize root traits?
Secondary growth of the roots of annual dicots has functional significance with regards to soil resource acquisition and transport, interactions with soil organisms and carbon sequestration.
Continue reading Thicker roots: to grow or not to grow? Investigating the dynamics of secondary root growth
A new framework aids in predicting gene regulatory networks associated with soybean nodule formation.
Continue reading Decoding Soybean Nodulation
Roots are critical for plants to find water and nutrients. They can also be expensive to grow, so a plant needs to send them in the right direction. How do they do this? A new paper by Daniel von Wangenheim and colleagues in Nature Plants examines how lateral roots grow towards water in the very earliest stages of their formation. The interior of the young root is almost a series of concentric layers. From the outside you pass through the epidermis, the cortex, and the endodermis until you hit the pericycle. The pericycle is a layer of cells that surrounds...
Continue reading Early Lateral Root Development Is Driven by Thirst
Flora: Inside the Secret World of Plants by DK [Dorling Kindersley] with contribution by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2018. Dorling Kindersley. Dorling Kindersley’s Flora: Inside the secret world of plants [hereafter referred to as DK’s Flora] is a stunning book. However, with no Introduction, one can be forgiven for not being entirely sure what DK’s Flora aims to achieve. In the book’s Foreword, Prof. Kathy Willis – formerly Director of Science at RBG Kew, which renowned plant science organisation is a co-publisher of the book – states that: “This book starts to redress this balance [contribution of plants to all...
Continue reading Visually stunning: Flora for juvenile – and adult – fauna
There’s been plenty of media attention on the threat plastics, especially microplastics, pose to animal life. A paper in New Phytologist suggests that there’s more to this. Plants might be suffering from plastic in the environment too. Rillig and colleagues have outlined a series of threats plastic poses to plant life. At the moment the risks are unproven. This is because it’s so much easier to spot plastic in aquatic systems than soil. The authors point out that particles of plastic might not seem important when soil is so particle-rich. However, they cite plenty of reports showing microplastics in many...
Continue reading Microplastics could pose a threat to plants
How will plants respond to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere? Botanists at BIFoR, the Birmingham Institute for Forest Research have gone underground to find some of the answers.
Continue reading Elevated carbon dioxide: Getting to the root of the problem
Can plants help fight global warming? Nigel Chaffey looks to the roots.
Continue reading Root hairs to halt global warming
The more I learn about roots, the more amazing they appear. Not only do they provide essential support for, and anchorage of, the aerial, above-ground, parts of the plant, they are the prime organs for abstracting water and a wide range of chemicals from the soil and transporting those throughout the plant. Furthermore, their ancient and profound association with fungi as mycorrhiza makes one of the most marvellous beneficial mutualisms on the planet. Not only are these root-fungal associations important to continued plant productivity, but they’ve also been implicated as a major driving force in the present-day success and diversity...
Continue reading Roots create … rock
Name: Orchids Scientific name: Family: Orchidaceae Known for: Beauty, epiphytism, providing vanilla flavouring, tiny seeds, mycorrhizae, deceptive pollination, mycoheterotrophy, medicinal usage, vegetating Krakatoa… Record broken: The world’s most trusting plant… The orchid family, the Orchidaceae, is one of the biggest flowering plant families with an estimated number of species ranging from 26,460 [Maarten Christenhusz et al., Plants of the World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Vascular Plants; University of Chicago Press, 2017] to >27,000]. Whilst that arguably means that there can be almost 27,000 unique ways to be an orchid, this item will have to restrict itself to generalisations. In particular,...
Continue reading Plant records: Can a plant be too trusting?
Zotz and colleagues ask for a re-evaluation of the occurrence, evolution, and function of the velamen radicum in both terrestrial and epiphytic angiosperms
Continue reading Adaptation in the root epidermis: the velamen radicumBotany 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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