Sap must flow, so the xylem must change.

The rDNA of Liverworts is unusually organised.

Dog-roses have some special genetic tricks to cope with odd-ploidy.

Not all Sphagnum moss manages water in the same way.

Banana genes reveal how they may have passed through other hybrid stages.

Seed germination is a critical step in the life cycle of flowering plants. Since seeds contain limited reserves, seed germination has to be tightly regulated to ensure that germination takes place in a suitable environment where seedlings can reach the sunlight and carry out photosynthesis before seed reserves are exhausted. However, seeds may not be […]

The genus Allium L., one of the largest monocotyledonous genera and one that includes many economically important crops with nutritional and medicinal value, has been the focus of classification or phylogeny studies for centuries. Recent studies suggested that the genus can be divided into 15 subgenera and 72 sections, which were further classified into three […]

How do plants react when circumstances change? One method can be to evolve a local adaptation. Another can be be phenotypic plasticity, changing the shape of the plant to tackle a local problem. Silvia Matesanz and colleagues examined the plant Lepidium subulatum, a gypsum specialist to see how it reacts. Matesanz and colleagues say that […]

A common event for flowering plants is whole genome duplication (WGD), where a plant gets extra chromosomes. It’s often studied in mature plants, but there can also be extra copies of the genome in the pollen, and that’s a problem. When it lands on a suitable plant stigma, the pollen develops a pollen tube to […]

Making a realistic plant in a computer model is possible, but is it necessary. All the computations generating the plant slow down the speed of any simulation. As a result it’s common to use simple geometric shapes for the leaves. But do you lose accuracy in the results, when you lose accuracy in the leaves? […]

Many grasses host symbiotic fungi, Epichloë spp. These fungi can help grasses tolerate herbivory, or help repel herbivores. But how do these fungi pass between plant hosts? They could be passed horizontally between plants, or vertically from plants to their seed offspring. Pedro Gundel and colleagues examined how Epichloë interacts with autumn bluegrass, Poa autumnalis. […]

We’re familiar with seeing insects flit from one flower to the next, carrying pollen as they do so. What happens when they carry pollen to the wrong flower species? Sachiko Nishida and colleagues have been testing some predictions on how reproductive interference in Geranium species could explain how clumps of specific species form. The idea […]