From Cocoa CRISPR to Artificial Plant Cells CRISPR is the latest “tool” in the plant molecular biology “toolbox”, and it’s being applied to many crops, including cocoa trees, as we saw in May 2018. Other plant science news from last May included reports of new information regarding plant interactions with…
From What Makes Plants Flower To “Sleeping” Trees. The subject of trees seemed to received a lot of attention in the April 2018 plant science news. The stories ranged from what actually constitutes a “tree” to how tree canopies seem to move during the night. Also, new clues to what,…
From “Talking” Trees To The Origin of Plant Hormones. The plant science news of March 2018 began with a recent (but a somewhat unfortunate, in my view) trend of mysticism somehow creeping into scientific studies of plant physiology. (Think plant consciousness. Or that plants possess some sort of “secret wisdom”.)…
From Plant Consciousness To A Bug-Eyed View of Flowers. Last February the plant science news ranged from the sedate to the ultraviolet. See, for example, below. Unconscious Plants?: “… a study published recently in Annals of Botany has shown that plants can be frozen in place with a range of…
A sampling of plant science news from 2018. For the past six years, I’ve started out the new year here at the How Plants Work blog by taking a look back at the previous year’s plant-related news from my HPW Twitter feed and sharing a few of the “tastier” tidbits,…
No Plant Says “Christmas” Like…. If there’s a plant most associated with Christmas, then, of course, it’s the Christmas tree. What would be in second place? Did you think poinsettia? If so, I suspect most people would agree with you. If you’re looking for a comprehensive website regarding poinsettias (e.g.,…
Finally, Is This Really “The Last Roundup®”? It’s been a pretty horrible year or so for herbicides. Last month there was a lot of bad news regarding the commonly-used herbicide Roundup® (glyphosate). A jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million to a cancer patient in a Roundup® lawsuit. (This led…
Psychedelic Biosynthesis. As noted in the previous post, the psychedelic compound psilocybin, naturally produced by “magic mushrooms“, has recently been biosynthesized “in high yields” in the laboratory via genetic engineering (see Ref. 1 below). By first isolating the genes involved in psilocybin biosynthesis from “magic mushrooms” in the genus Psilocybe,…
“Strawberry Fields Forever”. Thanks to this 1967 Beatles song (see below), strawberries may sometimes be associated with psychedelia, especially to people of a certain age (i.e., old farts like me). This comes to mind because psychedelic drugs have been in the news recently thanks to the publication of a popular…
Turgor Pressure + Plant Cell Wall “Loosening” = Growth. In the previous post, we explored the question of whether or not plants grew at night. The main point of this story was that plant cell turgor pressure is the force that drives plant cell enlargement, and thus plant growth. But…