One of the common features of plants they make their own food. But what happens inside a plant when they stop making their food and eat something else?

One way of improving the usefulness of a plant crop might come not from studying where the plant cells grow, but where they die.

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 […]

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 […]

Photosynthesis needs water. Guest blogger Maria Papanatsiou has a new way of increasing water efficiency in plants, enabling them to do more with less.

Enset, a relative of the banana, provides the staple food for around 20 million Ethiopians, yet is barely known outside of the region.

With over 28000 species of orchid, it seems like there's an orchid for every niche. The Dracula orchid's niche is mimicking a mushroom.

We asked the members of the in silico Plants editorial board about the experience that has had the biggest impact on their career. This is what they said:   A key moment was attending the ‘Mathematical modelling of plant development and gene networks’ meeting in Warwick in 2004, in the final few months of my […]

We might think of flowers in terms of their colour and scent, but what about their temperature? A new review in Annals of Botany looks at the thermal ecology of flowers. In the paper Casper van der Kooi and colleagues explore how flowers manipulate their temperature. Being able to raise or organs in the flower […]

Plants sometimes specialise. Catering for a specific partner can ensure a reliable source of food or pollination. At the same time, relying on that partner limits your adaptability. A new study by Guo and colleagues, A symbiotic balancing act: arbuscular mycorrhizal specificity and specialist fungus gnat pollination in the mycoheterotrophic genus Thismia (Thismiaceae), looks at […]

What is life like in a lake? Is it much like life on the shore, but wetter? Or are the environmental challenges significantly different?

All actively managed journals continually undergo self-analysis as they strive to improve their performance but it’s rare for the outcomes to be widely shared. A recent exception is an account of the first ten years of the not for profit, open access journal AoB PLANTS by its founding Chief Editor Mike Jackson. This informative warts-and-all account […]