From Glowing Plants to “Talking” Plants As usual, the plant news of February 2016, ranged from the molecular level to ecosystem level, from single plant cells to whole plants. And since I can’t discern any common themes, I’ll go with the stories that I “tweeted” during February of last year…
Here, There, and Everywhere? Recent headlines – China to acquire Syngenta and Chinese farmers are illegally growing GMO corn: Greenpeace – got me wondering about the proliferation (or lack of it) of GMO crop plants outside the USA. It’s seems well-known that biotech crops are not welcome in most of…
GMO? OMG! Back in the day, I used to be a member of the American Society of Plant Physiologists (ASPP), which morphed into the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) in 2001 to better reflect the diverse fields of plant science (read “plant molecular biology”) emerging in the 21st century.…
A Blast From The Past? Is it just me, or does there seem to be a lot about the so-called “rewilding” of crop plants in the news lately? (Please see here, for example.) I think I first heard the term “rewilding” about 20 years ago in a Biology Department seminar…
Scanning Plants? Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to identify all the different plant species in your backyard or in a nearby park from just small pieces of their leaves? And how cool would it be to use a smartphone app to determine exactly what kind of plants are…
On the Past, Present & Future of Plant Genetic Engineering Why would anyone want to insert foreign genes into plants? When and where was this technology invented? And how does it work? Who makes money from this technology? If you grow genetically-engineered crops in the field, won’t the foreign genes…
Forever Young? In a previous post, we saw how some Spanish scientists genetically modified (GM) plants in the genus Pelargonium (more commonly known as geraniums) so that they don’t produce pollen. (You can view the abstract of this paper here or read a provisional copy of the complete paper via…
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…
na.ked [nay-kid] adj.- “exposed to view or plainly revealed“ Good Times For Tomato Science The tomato (a.k.a., Solanum lycopersicum). What are the chemicals that make most homegrown tomatoes taste so good? What is the genome sequence of the domesticated tomato? And how is it related to wild relatives, and even…
New Meanings For “Medicinal Plants”? Plants have been used by humans for thousands of years as a source of medicines, some effective, many not so much (except perhaps as placebos). The first botanists were likely shaman herbalists who possessed the knowledge of which plants would kill and which plants would…