Whole genome duplication is often associated with gains in plant developmental complexity. Does this include secondary metabolites?

How fruits or flowers produce particular colouration or colour patterning is a question that often has complex answers. It may also seem to be a relatively trivial question. Don’t be fooled though – Barbara McClintock famously won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering transposons while working on why maize kernels often […]

The variation in genome size between different plant species is enormous, with a variation of 2300-fold in flowering plants alone. Whilst variation in plant genome size is well recorded, it is debatable how much of this variation arises from selective pressure rather than simply neutral drifting in genome size. Intriguingly, the size of plant genomes […]

Snow may not necessarily be a bad thing for plants

The precise colouration of red flowers differs according to where they are and what they interact with.

Diversity of parental environments could have comparable effects to genetic diversity in Arabidopsis.

Trees may invest more in protecting their canopy leaves from munching insects than their other leaves

C₄ photosynthesis is an efficient way of harnessing energy, yet trees rarely use it. Why is that?

Genes for carnivory arose from a duplication of the genome turning plants into hunters.

Why would a plant not frequently exposed to fire evolve to burn well?

Cutan must play a role in plant cuticles, but it's not clear how much cutan a cuticle contains.

While the term cell death may at first thought give connotations of an undesirable process, it is actually well known that cell death is an important part of the growth and development of many organisms, including in plants. Intentional cell death is known as programmed cell death, which is an umbrella term for a variety […]