Feature Channels: Plants

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URI Professor harvests student enthusiasm with hands-on research.

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In a serendipitous moment, scientists studying light sensing molecules in plants have discovered that they are also temperature sensors.The discovery may eventually allow them to design crop varieties that are better able to cope with a warming world.

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The new millipede also has bizarre-looking mouthparts of a mysterious function, four legs that are modified into penises, a body covered in long silk-secreting hairs, and paired nozzles on each of its over 100 segments that squirt a defense chemical of an unknown nature.

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One of the most detailed genomic studies of any ecosystem to date has revealed an underground world of stunning microbial diversity, and added dozens of new branches to the tree of life. The bacterial bonanza comes from scientists who reconstructed the genomes of more than 2,500 microbes from sediment and groundwater samples collected at an aquifer in Colorado.

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Of the many elusive grails of agricultural biotechnology, the ability to confer nitrogen fixation into non-leguminous plants such as cereals ranks near the very top.

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Project Associate Professor Kenji Suetsugu (Kobe University Graduate School of Science) has discovered a new species of plant on the subtropical Japanese island of Kuroshima (located off the southern coast of Kyushu in Kagoshima prefecture) and named it Gastrodia kuroshimensis. This research was published on October 14 in the Phytotaxa.

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Danforth Center research is addressing environmental issues related to production agriculture.

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GUIDE-Seq technology observes DNA damages and speeds the detection of DNA repair. "Without DNA repairing, we wouldn't be able to survive," says Guiliang Tang, a professor of biological sciences at Michigan Tech who helped lead a new study exploring how the technology could improve the detection of DNA damage and repair processes in plants.

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In one of television’s more bizarre recent offerings, the History Channel show “Appalachian Outlaws” follows a band of West Virginians as they hunt rugged forests for American ginseng, a medicinal root worth hundreds of dollars per pound. The show has high stakes: These men poach on federal lands, risking fines and jail time, and guard private patches with shotguns and homemade land mines. Most of them are out of work, out of savings and worried about paying for food and heat. Ginseng gives them a way to get by.

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University of Adelaide researchers have made a breakthrough in investigating salt tolerance in plants which could lead to new salt tolerant varieties of crops, and also answer unresolved questions in plant biology.

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From seed to closet, transforming the fashion industry through plant science.

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Understanding root zone-soil interaction key to increasing sustainability

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Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have mapped out two very different types of protein. One helps soil bacteria digest carbon compounds; the other protects cells from the effects of harmful molecules.

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The treatment increases the efficiency of bactericide by ensuring that light and rainfall don't degrade the treatments before they target the HLB-causing bacteria.

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Plants – even relatively small ones – played a crucial role in establishing a beachhead for life on land, according to recent work by an international team from China, the U.S., the U.K., and the University of Saskatchewan. The team found that early in the history of Earth’s terrestrial biosphere, a small plant called Drepanophycus, similar to modern club mosses, was already deeply rooted. This kept soils from washing away and even allowed build up as the resilient above-ground parts of the plants caught silt during floods. These plants – typically a metre long at most – helped form deep, stable soils where other plants could thrive.

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Researchers have discovered an enzyme that plays a leading role in the formation of compounds that give aged wines their sought-after aroma.

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Many popular long-term drought estimates ignore the fact that plants will be less thirsty as carbon dioxide goes up. Plants’ lower water use could roughly halve some current estimates for the extent of future drought, especially in central Africa and temperate Asia.

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Click here to go directly to the Environment News Source.

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It is easy to study what you can see. Researchers know a lot about how plants work aboveground, but what happens out of sight under the surface may control more than we once thought.

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Plants are adapting to increasing atmospheric CO2 according to a new study from the University of Southampton. The research provides insight into the long-term impacts of rising CO2 and the implications for global food security and nature conservation.

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A Bosnian pine (Pinus heldreichii) growing in the highlands of northern Greece has been dendrocronologically dated to be more than 1075 years old. This makes it currently the oldest known living tree in Europe. The millenium old pine was discovered by scientists from Stockholm University (Sweden), the University of Mainz (Germany) and the University of Arizona (USA).

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A well-known family of natural compounds, called “terpenoids,” have a curious evolutionary origin. In particular, one question relevant to future drug discovery has puzzled scientists: exactly how does Nature make these molecules?

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A study led by researchers from the National University of Singapore revealed that most tropical butterflies feed on a variety of flower types, but those that are ‘picky’ about their flower diets tend to prefer native plants and are more dependent on forests. These ‘picky’ butterflies also have wings that are more conspicuous and shorter proboscis.

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2016 is the final year for the soil fumigant to be used in California crop fields.

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Both Markets Are Eager for Sustainable Agriculture Solutions

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Ever thought of putting sewage on your plants? Scientists say thermally conditioned sewage sludge serves as an excellent fertilizer to improve soil properties. This was recently published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Nutrition. The major advantage over commercial fertilizers? Sustainable re-use of essential and finite phosphorus resources.

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UF/IFAS is helping save the Ghost Orchid.

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Amateur and professional entomologists are experts at their own version of Pokémon Go. After all, part of their job is to search for and collect rare insect species that are stored in the archives of natural history museums.

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A new report from the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis offers a big picture look at the scale and impacts of nitrogen in California. According to the report, excess nitrogen in the state comes primarily from agriculture and fossil fuel combustion. For years, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources scientists have been working with farmers throughout the state to refine fertilizer management, irrigation efficiency and other farming practices to manage nitrogen, and the work continues. The following are some examples of current UC ANR research and extension projects to manage nitrogen.

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Indoor air pollution is an important environmental threat to human health, leading to symptoms of “sick building syndrome.” But researchers report that surrounding oneself with certain house plants could combat the potentially harmful effects of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), a main category of these pollutants. Interestingly, they found that certain plants are better at removing particular harmful compounds from the air, suggesting that, with the right plant, indoor air could become cleaner and safer

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Which organic fertilizer will produce the best green chile? A graduate student is researching three types of organic fertilizers: compost, processed chicken manure and compost tea. She is studying plant growth, fruit yield and quality of two hybrid long green chile varieties.

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Looking different to your parents can provide species with a way to escape evolutionary dead ends, according to new research from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

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University of Adelaide researchers are rethinking plant breeding strategies to improve the development of new high-yielding, stress-tolerant cereal varieties.

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Scientists have tracked the flight paths of a group of bumblebees throughout their entire lives to find out how they explore their environment and search for food.

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UF/IFAS researchers are looking for ways to thwart angular leaf spot, a pathogen that can destroy up to 10 percent of Florida’s $300 million-a-year strawberry crop in years with multiple freezes.

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A joint University of Adelaide-Shanghai Jiao Tong University study has provided the first broad picture of the evolution and possible functions in the plant of pollen allergens.

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Marsh plant biomass had dropped 35 percent over 30 years

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New research from the University of British Columbia suggests evolution is a driving mechanism behind plant migration, and that scientists may be underestimating how quickly species can move.

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PNNL scientists have untangled a soil metagenome – all the genetic material recovered from a sample of soil – more fully than ever before, reconstructing portions of the genomes of 129 species of microbes. While it’s only a tiny proportion of the species in the sample, it’s a leap forward for scientists who have had only a fraction of that success to date.

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First discovered in 2009, there are now a total of six known UK infestations of the Lasius neglectus which thrive in greenhouses and domestic gardens. Originating from Asia, they are likely to have arrived in the UK through the import of plants from infected areas.

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The precise mechanisms involved in tomato softening have remained a mystery until now. Research led by Graham Seymour, Professor of Plant Biotechnology in the School of Biosciences at The University of Nottingham, has identified a gene that encodes an enzyme which plays a crucial role in controlling softening of the tomato fruit.

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A UF/IFAS scientist has identified two areas of the sorghum genome that could boost the plant’s resistance to the anthracnose disease. Sorghum is a grain known to produce feed for livestock and biofuel.

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Dating back nearly 150 years, a classic example of symbiosis has been the lichen: a mutually helpful relationship between an alga and a fungus.

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Since the discovery of their true nature 140 years ago, lichens have been the poster children for symbiosis. In the textbook definition of a lichen, the filaments of a single fungus provide protection for photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria, which in turn provide food for the fungus.

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Garden grass could become a source of cheap and clean renewable energy, scientists have claimed.

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Forests take up 25 - 30 percent of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide -- a strong greenhouse gas -- and are therefore considered to play a crucial role in mitigating the speed and magnitude of climate change. However, a new study that combines future climate model projections, historic tree-ring records across the entire continent of North America, and how the growth rates of trees may respond to a higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shown that the mitigation effect of forests will likely be much smaller in the future than previously suggested.

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Dublin, Ireland, Tuesday July 19, 2016 - An international consensus demands human impacts on the environment "sustain", "maintain", "conserve", "protect", "safeguard", and "secure" it, keeping it within "safe ecological limits". But, a new Trinity College Dublin-led study that assembled an international team of environmental scientists shows that policy makers have little idea what these terms mean or how to connect them to a wealth of ecological data and ideas.

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Chimpanzees who travel are more frequent tool users, according to new findings from the University of Neuchâtel and the University of Geneva, Switzerland, to be published in eLife.

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An international team of scientists has sequenced the whole genomes and epigenomes of more than 1,000 Arabidopsis thaliana plants, sampled from geographically diverse locations. The collection of 1,001 genomes and 1,001 epigenomes not only illuminates new aspects of its evolutionary history, but also provides a comprehensive, species-wide picture of the interaction between genetic and epigenetic variation in this important model plant.