“Plants to Uncover Landmines” This was the headline of the news item in Nature magazine in 2004 that first introduced me to the idea of using plants to detect explosives. According to this news article: “A genetically engineered plant that detects landmines in soil by changing colour could prevent thousands…
There’s Gold (Au) in Them Thar Leaves! (with apologies to M. F. Stephenson) In the previous post, we explored the notion that plants could be used as a sort of “biosensor” to detect the presence of dead bodies. By the way, a “biosensor” may be loosely defined as an analytical…
Pushing Up Daisies? As a former professional plant physiologist (and semi-lapsed plant-related blog-scribbler), I still occasionally peruse the plant literature to see what’s new. In doing so, I sometimes come across an article with a title that certainly piques my curiosity. Such an enticing article, recently published online in Trends…
Remember Ebola? About five years ago I wrote a post (please see here) about how, and why, plants were involved in developing effective therapies against the Ebola virus. Fast-forward to the present… …and now the human pathogenic virus on center stage is a coronavirus, namely, SARS-CoV-2. As I write this,…
First Signs of Spring? We’re about to switch to the stupid “daylight savings time” here in the Pacific Northwest, and I’m starting to see some daffodils around town…both iconic signs of spring in many parts of the world. The appearance of the daffs motivated me to revisit this post from…
Going Viral? All the recent news regarding the coronavirus (COVID-19) got me wondering about the question: Can plant viruses affect (infect?) humans? Is this a silly question? Maybe not, because I was a bit surprised when I did a cursory search on Google Scholar. It turns out that some virologists…
From How Plants Sense Temperature To A Plant-Robot Hybrid. The December 2018 plant science news certainly covered a mixed bag of topics…from how a plant senses how hot it is to a robo-plant that can drive toward the light. How Hot Is It?: “When it gets hot outside, humans and…
From “Friendly” Bacteria To Plants In The “Fast-Lane”. A key word in the plant science news of November 2018 appears to be “heat”…from how hot temperatures affects plant genetics to how hot (as in spicy) plants may be used for pain relief. Also featured in last November’s news was how…
From Taller Arctic Plants To GMO Organic Farming. A recurring topic in the plant science news of last October seemed to be “big”, as in Arctic plants may be getting bigger due to a warming climate, or making bigger fruit using genetic engineering. Speaking of GMO’s, the idea of organic…
From Trees That “Bleed” Metals To Visualizing Danger Signals In Plants. There was lots of unusual plant science news last September, from trees that apparently accumulate certain heavy metals, such as nickel, to plants that glow in the dark when wounded. Added to these September 2018 stories are reports ranging…