The Science of Flower Development….Doesn’t It Ruin the Aesthetic Beauty of Flowers? I’m aware of no better answer to such a question than this one from Richard Feynman: OK, now back to flower development, in general, and daffodils, in particular.… About The Daffodil’s “Trumpet” A report recently published online in…
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…
Sneeze The pollen from some plants can cause allergic rhinitis, a.k.a., “hay fever” in many people. This is because, when the pollen is inhaled into the nasal passages, antigens on the surface of the pollen elicit an immune response in people with a sensitized immune system. (In grass pollen, the…
Fast-Forward Flowering Do many plants seem to you to be flowering earlier in the spring? You may be correct. One of the most interesting scientific articles I’ve recently read reports that plants are indeed flowering earlier, and, more significantly, faster than most experimental models have predicted. (Excellent summaries of this…
The Players Because the genetic story of how plants flower turns out to involve many cellular “players”, as well as an intricate plot, perhaps it would be a good idea to first introduce the main “cast of characters”. Let’s start with florigen. As previously described, this is the so-called flowering…
We’ve seen that some plant species flower “autonomously” , that is, with little or no regard to environmental signals. However, most of what is known about how plants make flowers comes from research on plants that do rely on environmental guidance for flower initiation. It’s Time To Flower The correct…
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…
Many Plants Flower in Response to Night Length For nearly 100 years scientists tried to identify the elusive flowering hormone called florigen. Early in the last century two USDA researchers took a major step toward this by discovering how to induce flowering in plants under controlled conditions. In 1920, these…
Warming Temps –> “Fast-Forward” Flowering Unusually warm temperatures often cause some plants to flower early. For example, this spring in eastern North America unseasonably high temperatures have induced some plants to put flowering on “fast forward”. Coincidentally, a recently-published research report (see Ref. 1 below) has revealed a genetic “switch”…
The First Flower? How did flowering plants (angiosperms) evolve from non-flowering seed plants (gymnosperms)? Or did they? When did the first flowers appear on this planet? And where on Earth did it occur? These are some of the most hotly-debated questions among botanists today, partly because some of the fossil-based…