The soil environment that natural populations of plants are exposed to is quite complex. Bacteria represent major players in the soil with cell numbers thought to approach 1 × 109 –1.5 × 1010 per gram of soil...
Tag - sex determination
William Salter
Sexual dimorphism and rapid turnover in gene expression in pre-reproductive seedlings of a dioecious herb
Sexual dimorphism in morphology, physiology or life history traits is common in dioecious plants at reproductive maturity, but it is typically inconspicuous or absent in juveniles. Although plants of different sexes...
Alex Assiry
Amborella trichopoda helps reveal features of the first flowering plants
It's difficult to peer into the past to see the first flowering plant, but Charlie Scutt shows how an ancestor in the modern-era provides some clues as to what it looked like.
Guest Author
Genetic sex determination and sexual instability in Amborella trichopoda
Amborella trichopoda, the sister species of all other extant angiosperms, is typically dioecious, producing male and female flowers on separate individuals. Anger et al. map sex phenotypes onto a phylogeny of basally...
botanyone
Environmental regulation of sex determination in oil palm (Review)
In the African oil palm, Elaeis guineensis, male and female inflorescences are produced separately in an alternating cycle that is influenced by the environment: stress conditions promote male flowering, but the...
Botany for Halloween – Witches, Brooms and Pumpkins
At the moment, I am teaching plant hormones in our course on plant cell and developmental biology (BS1003). Fortunately, hormones and development link well with Halloween this year: we have witches, sitting on a broom...
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
Flower unisexuality in dioecious date palm
Dioecy has evolved independently several times during the evolution of flowering plants, but knowledge of the mechanisms involved is poor. Phoenix dactylifera is a dioecious species displaying strong dimorphism between...
