Feature Channels: Plants

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New research at the University of Adelaide has opened the way for the development of new lines of barley with resistance to powdery mildew.

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Crape myrtle, an iconic tree in many yards around the country, has a new disease problem, researchers have found.

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After collectors found specimens of the prickly plant in 1974 and 1990, it was wrongly identified as three different species. Now a University of Utah botanist and colleagues identified the plant as a new, possibly endangered species named “from the heart” in Latin because it was found in Valentine, Texas.

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In new research on how pollinators find flowers when background odors are strong, researchers have found that both natural plant odors and human sources of pollution can conceal the scent of sought-after flowers.

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Some clover species have two forms, one of which releases cyanide to discourage nibbling by snails and insects and the other of which does not. A scientist at Washington University in St. Louis found that this "polymorphism" has evolved independently in six different species of clover, each time by the wholesale deletion of a gene. The clover species are in a sense predisposed to develop this trait, suggesting that evolution is not entirely free form but instead bumps up against constraints.

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A naturally occurring microbe in soil that inhibits the rice blast fungus has been identified by a team of researcher from the University of Delaware and the University of California at Davis.

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Many have assumed that warmer winters as a result of climate change would increase the growth of trees and shrubs because the growing season would be longer. But shrubs achieve less yearly growth when cold winter temperatures are interrupted by temperatures warm enough to trigger growth.

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A South American insect may hold the key to controlling the spread of the invasive Brazilian peppertree, which supplants native vegetation critical to many organisms in several states.

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Plant scientists find fatty acid desaturating enzymes link up to pass intermediate products from one enzyme to another. Engineering these enzyme interactions could be a new approach for tailoring plants to produce useful products.

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Just in time for Mother's Day, UF/IFAS Horticultural Researcher Ria Leonard, demonstrates the proper way to select and care for cut flowers to keep them looking good for longer.

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Iowa State University engineers and plant scientists are working together to study and develop better crops. The research team has organized an International Workshop on Engineered Crops April 28-29 in Des Moines, Iowa.

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A common plant puts out a welcome mat to bacteria seeking to invade, and scientists have discovered the mat’s molecular mix. The team showed that the humble and oft-studied plant Arabidopsis puts out a molecular signal that invites an attack from a pathogen. The study reveals new targets during the battle between microbe and host.

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Did domesticating a plant typically take a few hundred or many thousands of years? Genetic studies often indicate that domestication traits have a fairly simple genetic basis, which should facilitate their rapid evolution under selection. On the other hand, recent archeological studies of crop domestication have suggested a relatively slow spread and fixation of domestication traits. An article in “The Modern View of Domestication,” a special issue of PNAS, tries to resolve the discrepancy.

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A recent interdisciplinary conference that led to the publication of a special issue of PNAS on domestication raised more questions than it answered. Washington University in St. Louis scientists Fiona Marshall and Ken Olsen, who participated in the conference and contributed to the special issue, discuss some of the key questions that have been raised about this pivotal event in human history.

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Biologists at UC San Diego have succeeded in visualizing the movement within plants of a key hormone responsible for growth and resistance to drought. The achievement will allow researchers to conduct further studies to determine how the hormone helps plants respond to drought and other environmental stresses driven by the continuing increase in the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, or CO2, concentration.

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A new study overturns a long-held theory in plant science, showing that plant sugars--not the the plant hormone auxin-- play a dominant role in regulating branching at plant stems.

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For Simon Gilroy, sometimes seeing is believing. In this case, it was seeing the wave of calcium sweep root-to-shoot in the plants the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of botany is studying that made him a believer.

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An international research group led by Arizona State University professor Qiang "Shawn" Chen has developed a new generation of potentially safer and more cost-effective therapeutics against West Nile virus and other pathogens.

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Plants fine-tune the response of their cells to the potent plant hormone auxin by means of large families of proteins that either step on the gas or put on the brake in auxin’s presence. Scientists at Washington University have learned that one of these proteins, a transcription factor, has an interaction region that, like a button magnet, has a positive and negative face. Because of this domain, the protein can bind two other proteins or even chains of proteins arranged back-to-front.

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By thoroughly mapping a single specialized tissue involved in wood formation, scientists at North Carolina State University have developed the equivalent of turn-by-turn directions for future plant research.

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By engineering plants that emitted sex pheromones that mimic those naturally produced by two species of moths, researchers have demonstrated that an effective, environmentally friendly, plant-based method of insect control is possible.

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Visit the website Notes from Nature, a crowdsourcing project that aims to enable transcription of specimen labels and ledgers from the world's 3 billion biodiversity research specimens.

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Field ecologists go to great lengths to get data: radio collars and automatic video cameras are only two of their creative techniques for documenting the natural world. So when a group of ecologists set out to see how wind moves seeds through isolated patches of habitat carved into a longleaf pine plantation in South Carolina, they twisted colored yarn to create mock seeds that would drift with the wind much like native seeds.

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Plant roots and certain human membrane systems resist chemical transport in much the same way, say researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology in a recent journal article. This similarity could make it easier to assess chemical risks for both people and plants, and may even lead to a new approach to testing medications.

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An international research team has determined the distribution of species of vegetation over nearly half the world’s land area could be affected by predicted global warming.

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For plants, the only way to grow is for cells to expand. Unlike animals, cell division in plants happens only within a tiny region of the root and stem apex, making cell expansion the critical path to increased stature. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports the discovery of a hormone and receptor that control cell expansion in plants.

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Spraying fungicide to kill coffee rust disease, which has ravaged Latin American plantations since late 2012, is an approach that is "doomed to failure," according to University of Michigan ecologists.

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An international collaboration with strong Aggie ties has figured out how to make a longer cotton fiber — information that a Texas A&M University biologist believes could potentially have a multi-billion-dollar impact on the global cotton industry and help cotton farmers fend off increasing competition from synthetic fibers.

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Research demonstrates that ant-dispersed plants (myrmecochores) compete for ant dispersers by staggering seed release.

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A team of researchers studying plants has assembled the largest dated evolutionary tree, using it to show the order in which flowering plants evolved specific strategies, such as the seasonal shedding of leaves, to move into areas with cold winters. The results will be published Dec. 22 in the journal Nature.

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Using the largest dated evolutionary tree of flowering plants ever assembled, a new study suggests how plants developed traits to withstand low temperatures, with implications that human-induced climate change may pose a bigger threat than initially thought to plants and global agriculture.

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Scientists have developed a new set of molecular tools for controlling the production of (poly)phenols, plant compounds important for flavors, human health, and biofuels.

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A new study has uncovered an unprecedented example of horizontal gene transfer in a South Pacific shrub that is considered to be the sole survivor of one of the two oldest lineages of flowering plants.

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From Massachusetts to Mississippi, a unicellular protist is hinting at answers about the evolution of multicellularity while raising a whole new set of questions.

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Floods didn't make floodplains fertile during the dawn of human agriculture in the Earth's far north because the waters were virtually devoid of nitrogen. Instead, the hardy Norsemen and early inhabitants of Russia and Canada can thank cyanobacteria in the floodplains themselves for the abundant grasses that fed game and cattle, a process that continues today.

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As drylands of the world become even drier, water will not be the only resource in short supply. Levels of nutrients in the soil will likely be affected, and their imbalance could affect the lives of one-fifth of the world’s population.

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When early-foraging ant species are displaced by later-foraging ant species due to climate change, early blooming plant species suffer. The presence of effective dispersers is as important as abiotic requirements in shaping a plant's niche.

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A new study that decoded the DNA sequence of the kiwifruit has concluded that the fruit has many genetic similarities between its 39,040 genes and other plant species, including potatoes and tomatoes. The study also has unveiled two major evolutionary events that occurred millions of years ago in the kiwifruit genome.

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Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have identified the key genes required for oil production and accumulation in plant leaves and other vegetative plant tissues. Enhancing expression of these genes resulted in vastly increased oil content in leaves, the most abundant sources of plant biomass-a finding that could have important implications for increasing the energy content of plant-based foods and renewable biofuel feedstocks.

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A new study by researchers at North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND USA and the Universidad de Costa Rica shows that the furled leaves of Heliconia and Calathea plants where Spix’s disc-winged bats make their home actually help to amplify and transmit the social calls of the bats. The findings of Dr. Erin Gillam of NDSU and Dr. Gloriana Chaverri appear in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.