When plant cells communicate, plasmodesmata serve as crucial conduits. These channels cross cell walls, linking one cell to its neighbor. If a plant needs to grow larger or fight off a pathogen, molecular signals pass through plasmodesmata to keep cells … Continue reading
Journal Club
Highlighting recently published papers selected by Academy members
Category Archives: Plant Biology
Journal Club: Insights from 3-D images defy assumptions about how plant cells communicate
Categories: Cell Biology | Journal Club | Plant Biology
Tagged Arabidopsis, cell communication, electron microscopy, plant cell, plasmodesmata
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Journal Club: Virus-infected plants create buzz among bees
A bout of a viral infection can leave tomato plants stunted and their leaves sickly. But it might offer a surprising reproductive boost: infected plants release a different smell than healthy ones, and that unique aroma can draw more bees … Continue reading
Journal Club: Ancient Chinese may have cultivated grass seeds 30,000 years ago
Typically, archaeological research into the origins of agriculture has focused on western Asia, in areas such as the Fertile Crescent (the present-day Middle East). Now scientists report that intentional collection of grass seeds may be traced back about 30,000 years … Continue reading
Categories: Agriculture | Journal Club | Plant Biology
Tagged agriculture, archaeobotany, China, millet, rice, seeds
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Journal Club: Why do trees fix nitrogen in certain forests and not others? Model offers insights with big implications for the biosphere
Many trees can generate their own fertilizer from nitrogen in the air. But it remains a mystery as to why they grow where they do – for example, few grow in the nitrogen-poor soils of temperate forests but many thrive … Continue reading
Categories: Ecology | Environmental Sciences | Journal Club | Plant Biology
Tagged forests, model, nitrogen, pollution, trees
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Journal Club: Cultivated sweet potatoes were genetically modified — naturally
The first genetically modified foods were not human creations. Scientists have now found that sweet potatoes all over the world naturally contain bacterial genes that the microbes introduced. Such transgenes may have provided attractive traits for domestication, researchers added. The … Continue reading
Categories: Agriculture | Anthropology | Genetics | Journal Club | Plant Biology
Tagged cultivated, domestication, genetically modified, sweet potato, transfer DNA
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Journal Club: Genetic detective work suggests a crucial role for Maya in papaya domestication
Papaya is a multimillion-dollar crop with a complicated sex life. Now plant geneticist Ray Ming at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues find that hermaphrodite papayas, the version most useful to farmers, most likely arose due to … Continue reading
Categories: Agriculture | Genetics | Journal Club | Plant Biology
Tagged domestication, genome, Maya, papaya
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New signaling system discovered in plants
When you step on a plant, douse it with salt water, or pluck its leaves off, it doesn’t look like the plant responds, as it stands immobilized by its roots in the ground. But plants are in-tune to their environment … Continue reading
Categories: Plant Biology
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Helping crops deal with drought
Farming has long focused on chemicals that can fight insects or kill weeds. Now scientists have discovered a molecule that could help crops deal with droughts, report findings appearing online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of … Continue reading
Categories: Plant Biology
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Ideas germinate for seed collector
[slideshow_deploy id=’857′] Artist Svjetlana Tepavcevic is a portraitist of seeds. When she finds a seed she doesn’t recognize she appreciates it for a while on its own, visual terms, before attaching it’s scientific name and history. Often this information … Continue reading
Categories: Plant Biology | Science and Culture | Visual Science
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Harvard Research Forest–Fertile soil for scientists and artists
[slideshow_deploy id=’673′] The Harvard Research Forest might not seem like the most obvious or attractive location for creating nature photography. The trees are wrapped in cables, shrubs enclosed in plastic, and unsightly pipes run from here to there. The forest, … Continue reading
Categories: Ecology | Environmental Sciences | Plant Biology | Visual Science
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