From Stressed Plants as Good Neighbors to the Genome of a Parasitic Flowering Plant. And the top five most popular tweets of 2021 at HowPlantsWork are: #5 – How plants become good neighbours in times of stress “So how do plants prevent elongated growth under deep shade conditions? The secret lies in…
From Killer Citrus Disease to Driller Plant Roots. In this penultimate episode in counting down the top 25 tweets of HowPlantsWork, we go from #10 to #6. #10 – Researchers find peptide that treats, prevents killer citrus disease “Huanglongbing, HLB, or citrus greening has multiple names, but one ultimate result: bitter…
From How Roots Provide Symbiotic Bacteria Oxygen to How Flowers Changed the Evolution of Life on Earth. Counting down the top 25 tweets of 2021 from HowPlantsWork, here’s Part 3 – #15 to #11: #15 – How legumes give oxygen to symbiotic bacteria in their roots “The roots of legume…
From the Extinction of Indigenous Languages to the Perseverance of New York City’s Wildflowers. What were the top 25 tweets of 2021 from HowPlantsWork? Here’s Part 2 – #20 to #16: #20 – Extinction of Indigenous languages leads to loss of exclusive knowledge about medicinal plants “Many of today’s mass-market…
Welcome Back! After over more than a year-long hiatus from scribbling blog posts, we’re back. Let’s resume by counting down the “top 25 tweets” of 2021 from the HowPlantsWork twitter feed. “What the heck is a top tweet”?, you may ask. As defined by Twitter, it’s a ranking of tweets…
“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…