If you share a pollinator with another plant species in your location, is it a good idea to flower at the same time? You can only use pollen from another plant in the same species. If a bee arrives loaded with another species’s pollen, then what you get is junk. Similarly, if you load a […]

When you look at a patch of flowers, you often see clusters of colour. Even when a single species can have many different colours, you get patches. Why? How does a plant know to grow with this colour and not that colour? The answer is it doesn’t. The colour is set by the genes in […]

Scent matters. If you’re a flowering plant, scent is an important tool for attracting pollinators. It’s no surprise that botanists see it as a vital feature when studying pollination. But what happens when pollinators don’t matter? What happens to scent when a plant stops using animals for pollination and relies on the wind? It’s not […]

Many plants produce colourful flowers that play a role in pollinator attraction. These floral visual signals may have distinct optical properties that differ in biological relevance. In this review, van der Kooi et al. discuss the optical properties and functional significance of common and uncommon aspects of floral visual signals. Drawing on a large body […]

Halophytes tolerate external salt concentrations of 200 mm and more, accumulating salt concentrations of 500 mm and more in their shoots; some, recretohalophytes, excrete salt through glands on their leaves. Ions are accumulated in central vacuoles, but the pathway taken by these ions from the outside of the roots to the vacuoles inside the cells […]

Light is indispensable for photosynthetic organisms, but excess light energy causes damage in photosystems and readily leads to cell death in severe environments such as Antarctica. Kosugi et al. determine reaction coefficients of photo-inactivation in three Antarctic dominant species, Prasiola crispa (green alga), Umbilicaria decussata (lichen) and Ceratodon purpureus (bryophyte). They relate them to light […]

Revealing the role played by the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) for organismal diversification and biogeography of plants in the Northern Hemisphere, Huang et al. assess phylogenetic relationships and divergence time, and reconstruct ancestral range for the tribe Lilieae (Liliaceae), including primarily temperate and alpine lineages with disjunct distribution in the North Temperate Zone. The biogeographic analyses, […]

How can plants perceive mechanical stress such as touch? Calcium and several proteins are known to be involved, but it is still unclear how they interact. VIP1 of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana is a bZIP (basic Leucine Zipper Domain) transcription factor and one of such proteins. When cells perceive mechanical stress, VIP1 moves from […]

Flavonols are plant produced secondary metabolites and could exert health-promoting effects in humans. To become stable and functional molecules, flavonols are firstly biosynthesized and then modified, mostly by adding sugar donors via glycosylation. Flavonoid biosynthesis derives from the phenylalanine metabolic pathway and has been well characterized in Arabidopsis thaliana. Li et al. reveal that the […]

Silica bodies are inorganic compounds deposited in the vegetative and/or reproductive tissues of many angiosperm families, including the aquatic plant family Podostemaceae. Costa et al. analyse leaves of neotropical taxa through conventional light and scanning electron microscopy. Silica bodies were found in epidermis, subepidermis and perivascular sheath, and have considerable morphological diversity. Their presence is […]

The genus Stylosanthes includes nitrogen-fixing and drought-tolerant species of considerable economic importance for perennial pasture, green manure and land recovery. Stylosanthes scabra is adapted to variable soil conditions, being cultivated to improve pastures and soils worldwide. Previous studies have proposed S. scabra as an allotetraploid species (2n = 40) with a putative diploid A genome […]

Limited supply of mineral nutrients such as potassium increases the root-to-shoot ratio. This also increases the ratio between water-absorbing and -losing plant surface. Water uptake per unit surface has to either decrease (root) or increase (shoot). Coffey et al. test this on 2–3 week old barley plants grown with low supply of potassium (Low-K). The […]