Feature Channels: Plants

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Plants and soil microbes may be altered by climate warming at different rates and in different ways, meaning vital nutrient patterns could be misaligned.

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A plant found throughout Southeast Asia traditionally used to treat arthritis and rheumatism contains a potent anti-HIV compound more powerful than the drug AZT, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Natural Compounds.

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In 1859, Charles Darwin included a novel tree of life in his trailblazing book on the theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species. Now, scientists from Rutgers University-New Brunswick and their collaborators want to reshape Darwin’s tree.

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Penn State University joined the International Alliance for Phytobiomes Research as a sponsoring partner, both organizations announced on June 6.

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Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have identified a gene that keeps grasses from entering their flowering cycle until the season is right, a discovery that may help plant breeders and engineers get more from food and energy crops.

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A new study by scientists at the University of Birmingham has revealed a group of cells that function as a ‘brain’ for plant embryos capable of assessing environmental conditions and dictating when seeds will germinate.

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A molecular system for artificial photosynthesis is designed to mimic key functions of the photosynthetic center in green plants—light absorption, charge separation, and catalysis—to convert solar energy into chemical energy stored by hydrogen fuel.

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Corn, beans, and squash—the “three sisters”—have traditionally been grown together for best results. The Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) June 1 Soils Matter blog post explains how companion plantings use plants’ strengths to their best advantage.

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Camille Delavaux studies mycorrhizal fungi and plant pathogens in the context of plant invasion in tropical ecosystems.

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Researchers have figured out how a once-defeated bacterium has re-emerged to infect cotton in a battle that could sour much of the Texas and U.S. crop. And it boils down to this: A smart bacteria with a sweet tooth.

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University of Georgia researchers are part of an international team that has published the first sunflower genome sequence.

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A spider and an ant with names drawn from popular books, a pink katydid and an omnivorous rat made ESF's list of the Top 10 New Species for 2017. Also listed: a freshwater stingray, a bush tomato that appears to “bleed,” a devilish-looking orchid, a millipede with more than 400 legs, an amphibious centipede and a marine worm.

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A University of Delaware professor teamed with a local high school student on research that found injured plants will send out warning signals to neighboring plants. The signals are sent through airborne chemicals released mainly from leaves, and plants that received them boosted their defenses.

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UF/IFAS researchers have discovered that a mandarin hybrid developed by colleagues contains cellular activity – known as metabolites -- that makes it more able to fend off greening than most other types of citrus.

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The carnivorous humped bladderwort plant, Utricularia gibba, is a sophisticated predator. It uses vacuum pressure to suck prey into tiny traps at speeds less than a millisecond. A new genomic analysis shows that, over millions of years, it repeatedly retained and enhanced genetic material associated with its carnivorous nature. These include genes that facilitate the trapping of prey, the digestion of proteins, and the transport of small bits of protein from one cell to another.

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Around 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, a giant asteroid crashed into the present-day Gulf of Mexico, leading to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. How plants were affected is less understood, but fossil records show that ferns were the first plants to recover many thousands of years afterward. Now, a team including Cornell researchers reports the discovery of the first fossilized flowers from South America, and perhaps the entire Southern Hemisphere, following the extinction event

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A new study sequences the genomes of 80 silver birch trees, a tree that has not been studied much by scientists despite its commercial value for papermaking, construction, furniture-building and more. Researchers identified genetic mutations including mutations that may affect how well birch trees grow and respond to light at different latitudes and longitudes and under different environmental conditions. The research could help breed trees that better meet the needs of various industries.

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A recent discovery by Sandia National Laboratories researchers may unlock the potential of biofuel waste — and ultimately make biofuels competitive with petroleum.

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Shortly before her retirement, UF/IFAS plant pathology professor Monica Elliott talked about the past, present and predicted future of the health of Florida palm trees. She spoke at this week's meeting of the Florida Phytopathological Society.

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Growing evidence suggests that the hybridization of Tamarix may provide variation in traits that could promote local adaptation.

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Biologists at UC San Diego have provided the first evidence that a widely used pesticide can significantly impair the ability of otherwise healthy honey bees to fly. The study, which employed a bee “flight mill,” raises concerns about how pesticides affect honey bee pollination and long-term effects on the health of honey bee colonies.

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Scientists believe that biochar, the partially burned remains of plants, has been used as fertilizer for at least 2,000 years in the Amazon Basin. Since initial studies published several years ago promoted biochar, farmers around the world have been using it as a soil additive to increase fertility and crop yields. But a new study casts doubt on biochar’s efficacy, finding that using it only improves crop growth in the tropics, with no yield benefit at all in the temperate zone.

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Deprived of oxygen, naked mole-rats can survive by metabolizing fructose just as plants do, researchers report this week in the journal Science – a finding that could lead to treatments for heart attacks and strokes.

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An interdisciplinary teams of experts argue that world hunger and biodiversity loss can both be addressed by ensuring that women worldwide have access to education and contraception.

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A photo of a cup plant teaming with insects led a better understanding of the biology of Acanthocaudus wasps which inject their eggs into aphids that eat the plant. The adult wasps burst out of the aphids like an alien movie.

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A multi-institutional team used resources at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to catalog how desert plants photosynthetic processes vary. The study could help scientists engineer drought-resistant crops for food and fuel.

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Approximately 10-20 percent of white dwarfs exhibit strong magnetic fields, some of which can reach up to 100,000 tesla. In comparison, on Earth, the strongest magnetic fields that can be generated using nondestructive magnets are about 100 tesla. Therefore, studying the chemistry in such extreme conditions is only possible using theory and until now has not provided much insight to the spectra accompanying white dwarfs. Researchers in Germany describe their work modeling these systems this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics.

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Donald Danforth Plant Science Center have discovered a gene that influences grain yield in grasses related to food crops.

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A closer look at how the planet responds to greenhouse gases debunks recent observations suggesting Earth's temperature is less sensitive than climate models predict to rising carbon dioxide.

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Orchids make up 10 percent of the world's plant species; more than 50 percent of native orchids in North America are listed as threatened or endangered in some part of their home range. Botanist Dennis Whigham and his colleagues at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Md., are doing their part to conserve these beautiful flowers by studying the interactions between orchids and fungi.

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Vanderbilt geneticists have developed an effective method for identifying the plant genes that produce the chemical ammunition plants use to protect themselves from predation and is a natural source of many important drugs.

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ASPB named Blake Meyers, Ph.D. as the recipient of the Charles Albert Shull Award for outstanding contributions in the field of plant biology.

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ISU researchers are piecing together the genetic mechanisms that link plant growth and stress response. In a new paper, the research group links autophagy, an important energy recycling function, with slower growth during stress conditions. Autophagy plays a key role in animals as well as plants.

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This good news comes as Florida growers head into the heart of blueberry season.

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Can organic growers fight weeds and increase soil health? To grow crops organically, farmers fight weeds with chemical-free weapons. But it takes heavy tractors to efficiently turn soil and rip out weeds, compressing the soil. And after a field is turned, heavy rains and wind can erode the exposed soil. Researchers are working to get the best of both worlds.

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An insect infestation that is killing hemlock trees in New England forests is having a significant impact on the water resources of forested ecosystems that provide essential water supplies to one of the nation's most populous regions.

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A hardy perennial is a promising source of biofuel, and a UW-Milwaukee scientist is developing a technique to make a GMO version that cannot "infect" the genes of natural plants around it.

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We tend to assume that domestication is a one-way street and that, once domesticated, crop plants stay domesticated. A new study of rice shows, however, that different methods of farming change the evolutionary pressures on crop plants, and the plants easily "de-domesticate," evolving to take advantage of these opportunities.

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In the second half of the 20th century, the mass use of fertilizer was part of an agricultural boom called the “green revolution” that was largely credited with averting a global food crisis.

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Scientists from WCS have discovered a new species of wild ginger, spicing up a wave of recent wildlife discoveries in the Kabobo Massif – a rugged, mountainous region in Democratic Republic of Congo.

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Tiny strands of fungi weave through the roots of an estimated nine out of 10 plants on Earth, an underground symbiosis in which the plant gives the fungus pre-made sugars and the fungus sends the plant basic nutrients in return. Scientists are interested in enhancing this mechanism as a way to help plants grow on nutrient-poor lands.

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A four-year study of one rare and one common lupine growing in coastal dunes showed that a native mouse steals most of the rare lupines seeds while they are still attached to the plant. The mouse is a "subsidized species," given cover for nocturnal forays by European beachgrass, originally planted to stabilize the dunes.

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Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are using the decellularized husks of plants such as parsley, vanilla and orchids to form three-dimensional scaffolds that can then be primed and seeded with human stem cells to optimize their growth in the lab dish and, ultimately, create novel biomedical implants.

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UPTON, NY—Even plants have to live on an energy budget. While they’re known for converting solar energy into chemical energy in the form of sugars, plants have sophisticated biochemical mechanisms for regulating how they spend that energy. Making oils costs a lot. By exploring the details of this delicate energy balance, a group of scientists from the U.

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Annually, diseases, weeds, and insects are estimated to cause more than $1.3 billion in losses for sunflower growers. To combat this, researchers are preserving the genetic diversity of wild sunflowers. Wild plants retain the genes needed to resist pests and survive in different environments.

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The success of ecological restoration projects around the world could be boosted using a potential new tool that monitors soil microbes.

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Regular, unleaded or algae? That's a choice drivers could make at the pump one day. But for algal biofuels to compete with petroleum, farming algae has to become less expensive. Toward that goal, Sandia National Laboratories is testing strains of algae for resistance to a host of predators and diseases, and learning to detect when an algae pond is about to crash. These experiments are part of the new, $6 million Development of Integrated Screening, Cultivar Optimization and Validation Research (DISCOVR) project, whose goal is to determine which algae strains are the toughest and most commercially viable.

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists have released a new global, centralized database of plant root traits, or identifying characteristics, that can advance our understanding of how the hidden structure of plants belowground may interact with and relate to life aboveground.

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A new study from an ISU scientists shows the indirect impacts invasive species can have in an ecosystem. The study focused on the brown treesnake, whose introduction to the forests of Guam has led to difficulties for local tree species to reproduce.