What are the effects of genetic and environmental factors on seed heteromorphism and its variations?
Archive - November 2020
William Salter
Nectar thieves prefer daylight robbery
Displaying flowers in light rather than shadow should help them attract pollinators, but a good display can also attract thieves.
Alun Salt
Global climate change and grasslands: soil microbial diversity to the rescue!
New study the journal New Phytologist reveals the importance of soil microbial diversity for tolerating or recovering from drought, warming and nitrogen deposition.
Juniper Kiss
Woodiness only indirectly responsible for embolism resistance in Arabidopsis
Its correlation with intervessel pit membrane thickness provides the missing functional link.
Erin Zimmerman
Computer simulation highlights the importance of pollinator diversity
Sharing pollinators can cause problems when pollen competes for transport
Very fine roots act as renewed carbon sink in rewetted peatland forest
New study suggests that rewetting peatland forests could increase their climate change mitigation function.
Floral chemistry reveals the basis of an orchid pollinator shift
A greater concentration of a compound present throughout the species allowed one morph to attract bee pollinators.
Pollinators drive floral evolution in an Atlantic Forest genus
Can we use floral traits to accurately predict hummingbird and bat pollinators of the bromeliad genus Vriesea?
Plants that … CURE
Plants that cure: A natural history of the world’s most important medicinal plants* by Elizabeth A Dauncey and Melanie–Jayne R Howes, 2020. Kew Publishing. A few years ago Kew published a book about the deadly...
Nigel Chaffey
A new assessment of Madagascar’s Coffea species shows which traits reflect phylogenetic signal
Flowering phenology appears to have a strong genetic component, and may serve as a barrier to hybridization
A step to the biofuels of the future?
Compiling a genome of an Asian grass is already producing useful results for breeding.
The same mobile protein governs seed size and infloresence structure
The mobile protein connected to the regulation of flowering in Arabidopsis also helps regulate endosperm development in the seed.
Hugh Dickinson
Lessons from Mediterranean olive domestication: keep wild relatives close by and do not “overselect”
New study in the journal BMC Biology found that Mediterranean olives have almost as high genetic diversity as olive cultivars
The crowning glory of Kew
Palace of Palms: Tropical dreams and the making of Kew by Kate Teltscher 2020. Picador. The UK’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew near London are famed as much for the buildings and grounds, as the ground-breaking, world...
