Pitcairnia lanuginosa might look similar wherever you find it in South America, but hidden inside are some differences that can tell a tale about its past.

Arabidopsis thaliana is the lab rat of plant sciences. Mutants tweaked in certain genes can show the effects of hormones on plants, but it can be hard to change one response without changing some others. How do plants work? A common method to find out what the various things inside a plant do is to […]

Roots don’t simply take up nutrients from the soil. They also exude chemicals. The exudates released from living roots play an important role in plant nutrient acquisition. and biochemical processes in the rhizosphere. Root exudates can stimulate microbial activity to accelerate mineralization of soil organic matter, a phenomenon termed rhizosphere priming effect (RPE). The RPE […]

Sometimes it’s easy to oversimplify plant anatomy. For example, trees don’t have blood. They have sap. It might be tempting to say that they carry sap in their xylem, the way we have blood in their veins, but it’s a shallow comparison. There’s no heart pumping sap round a tree. And unlike humans, trees grow […]

Plants don’t have skeletons, but they still have a mineral component in them. Inside plants you can find phytoliths, microscopic mineral deposits that a plant forms from silica. Because these are mineral, when a plant rots away, its phytoliths persist. Luc Vrydaghs, one of members of the International Committee for Phytolith Taxonomy, explained that these […]

Banana cultivars are derived from hybridizations involving Musa acuminata subspecies. It divided into half a dozen or so subspecies. The current thought on domestication is that it was taken by human settlers when they moved, and interbred with local subspecies. The farmers would then select the least seedy bananas, and propagate them clonally. The modern […]

You're familiar with the idea that pollinators look at flower colour, but what about pollen colour? New research shows pollinators may have a much more significant influence than thought.

Adventitious roots are roots that form after the plant embryo has grown. They’re the roots that can grow out of stems when you make plant cuttings. Adventitious root formation is a bottleneck for the survival of isolated plant fragments. Adventitious root formation plays an important ecological role and is a critical process in cuttings for […]

Secondary growth is a process related to the formation of new cells that increase in size and wall thickness during xylogenesis. Temporal dynamics of wood formation influence cell traits, in turn affecting cell patterns across the tree ring. Buttò et al. verified the hypothesis that cell diameter and cell wall thickness are positively correlated with […]

Ant–plant associations are widely diverse and distributed throughout the world, leading to complex ecological networks. Regarding ant–plant mutualism, ant pollination is a very rare interaction and few studies have shown the role of ants as pollinators. Del-Claro et al. aimed to evaluate the role of ants as effective pollinators of Paepalanthus lundii (Eriocaulaceae) in a […]

The inverse correlation between atmospheric CO2 partial pressure (pCO2) and stomatal frequency in many plants has been widely used to estimate palaeo-CO2 levels. However, apparent discrepancies exist among the obtained estimates. Hu et al. attempted to find a potential proxy for palaeo-CO2 concentrations by analysing the stomatal frequency of Quercus glauca (section Cyclobalanopsis, Fagaceae), a […]

Reproductive interference can reduce fitness of either of the involved species, and its ecological and evolutionary consequences may depend on its underlying mechanisms.