“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…
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,…
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 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 Camouflaged Plants To “Padlocked” Plant Genes. Plants and animals DO have many things in common, mostly at the cellular level. But sometimes similarities may occur at higher functional levels, such as body pigmentation. And a story published last June provides such an example. Other plant science news in June…
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,…
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…