Mention of cave-dwelling plants living in extremis [see Uncovering underground Botany] brings to mind the real extremophiles of planet Earth, known – unsurprisingly! – as extremophiles. Although organisms in that category include representatives of all three domains of living things – the eukaryotes, bacteria, and Archaea, it’s the latter category that are the most extreme […]

What would you think if you saw that as a headline? You’d rightly be concerned. After all, you’d assume it was about human patients and, being a human, you’d understandably want to be (re)assured that any procedure carried out on your body in a hospital is safe and not likely to cause you damage. Fear […]

Hidden in the shadows, plants have survived catastrophic deforestation by taking refuge in caves.

We’re not usually that big on plant genomes (“the complete set of genetic information in an organism”) in Cuttings items. We know what they are, and appreciate their importance, but until those genomes are translated into known functions for all the genes identified, etc. there’s not as much of a story as we’d like. However, […]

We rightly ponder the problem of future food security – in which plants, plant science, and plant scientists (in the broadest sense of that term) have a big part to play. However, just as pressing is concern over sufficiency of fresh – i.e. clean, disease-free, drinkable – water for those hungry humans. Traditionally, one way […]

News of two new journals. Although neither is strictly a botanical or plant science publication, they both cover plant science-relevant topics. First is The Cell Surface. Published by Elsevier, The Cell Surface “is a highly multidisciplinary journal focused on aspects of the cell wall across all relevant disciplines, in the major groups of organisms that […]

Readers of this column will know that there is a problem with the inability – or unwillingness – of people generally to appreciate plants. This is the well-recognised phenomenon of plant blindness. Although we’ve talked about it before in Plant Cuttings items, it’s now time to go visual. To that end I’d shamelessly like to […]

PAR is the acronym for Photosynthetically-Active Radiation, and refers to light with wavelengths of 400 – 700 nm, the so-called visible spectrum, from red to violet. PAR is photosynthetically-active because it encompasses the range of wavelengths absorbed by pigments involved in photosynthesis – Chlorophyll a (Chl a) and various accessory pigments, including Chlorophylls b, c, […]

The cut flower industry – wherein stems of intact growing flowering plants are removed, and transported from their place of growth to a place of purchase by a customer and ultimately displayed in a vase (“a container for holding flowers”) containing water – is big business*. In the UK in 2006 it was estimated to […]

Although one shouldn’t, it is easy to accept that flowers (the defining feature of the angiosperms, the flowering plants) are ‘just there’ and get on with life in their quiet, seemingly unremarkable way. If one subscribed to that view, hardly any study of floral biology would be carried out, and we’d miss a lot of […]

Great things are possible when disciplines that may be studied separately and distinctly are brought together. For example, and famously, when botany, zoology, bacteriology, mycology, protistology, virology, chemistry, physics, and anthropology (and maybe a few more ‘-ologies’ and non-ologies…) come together we get the new(-ish) discipline of ecology. More modestly, this item is concerned just […]

Part of the goal of Plant Cuttings items is to share news of botanical research with the wider plant-minded community, the better to advertise that wonderful example of human scientific endeavour. And that’s fine for promoting the work of established plant scientists. But what about the not unimportant – i.e. very important – matter of […]