Posted in Plant Signaling, The Neighbors on May 18th, 2013
“It’s Through The Wire…” Most plants in the wild are interconnected via common mycorrhizal networks (CMN) . The “Wood-Wide-Web” and Plant “Social Networks” are two previous posts that explore one of the most intriguing – and frustrating – subjects in plant biology. Intriguing, because vascular land plants likely owe their existence to mycorrhizae. Frustrating, because [...]
Read Full Post »
The Sperm & Egg Tango In a paper published in the 23 November 2012 issue of Science magazine (Ref 1 below), Dr. Stephanie Sprunck and Prof. Dr. Thomas Dresselhaus and colleagues report a major finding regarding the cellular nature of sexual reproduction in plants. Specifically, they have been studying gamete interaction during fertilization in the [...]
Read Full Post »
Use Your Houseplants As TV Remotes? Using sophisticated sensing technology, Disney researchers, along with collaborators in Japan and Germany, displayed this interactive plant technology at the 2012 SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, California (August 5-9, 2012). Links to more information: Disney Research website PDF of Etech Abstract
Read Full Post »
Is There a Single Flower-Inducing Pathway? It’s well known that “florigen” is the signal that triggers the transition from vegetative to reproductive development in plants that flower in response to photoperiod. But some plants, for example the “Night-Neutral” (a.k.a., “Day-Neutral”) plants, apparently initiate flowering because of factors other than night length. In plants that flower [...]
Read Full Post »
Much can be found online about why leaves change colors in the fall… …but relatively little about the final part of the story, namely leaf drop. Components of this terminal process, called leaf abscission, are actually put into place at the beginning of the leaf’s life. At the end, a chemical signal from the leaf [...]
Read Full Post »
A Brief Stroll Down Memory Lane Previously, we delved into the subject of “long-term” (weeks to months) plant “memory” by exploring what’s new on the subject of vernalization, that is, how some plants “remember” that they have experienced winter. In this case, a “cold” treatment of some plant species over the course of weeks leads [...]
Read Full Post »
Posted in Plant Signaling, The Neighbors on Jul 26th, 2011
Mushrooms are the visible manifestations (sexual organs, actually) of microscopic, soil-dwelling fungi that form mutually-beneficial partnerships with plants. Since these filamentous fungi interact with the roots of plants, such symbiotic relationships are called mycorrhizae, literally “fungus root”. Fossil evidence supports the idea that these plant-fungal partnerships are as old as the emergence of terrestrial plants [...]
Read Full Post »
How a parasitic plant may “sniff out” its victims. As on the internet, once information is broadcast, even if only among ‘friends’, it becomes available for other unintended and unexpected uses. Dodder (genus Cuscuta) is a parasitic plant on other plants. But how does this plant find its host? Apparently, dodder seedlings locate potential hosts [...]
Read Full Post »
Smells Like Trouble If you’re crunching on a Wintergreen Lifesaver®, while drinking a cup of jasmine tea, you may be totally “freaking out” your nearby house plants. Why? Because you’re disseminating two volatile organic compounds known to have significant effects on plants, you may be inadvertently turning on hundreds of defense-related genes in your plants. [...]
Read Full Post »
Just Keep Talking The idea of chemical communication among plants has recently gone from being viewed as a fringe idea to an accepted biological phenomenon. We now know that plants use several different volatile organic compounds not only to send signals from one part of the plant to another part, but also to other nearby [...]
Read Full Post »
