From How Plants Tell Time To Saving The American Chestnut. Time seemed to be a recurring theme in the plant science news of August 2018…from how plants tell time to how long seeds have to successfully germinate. The future was also a theme…from the future of food production in the…
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…
Do Plants Grow More During The Day Or At Night? A silly question? Whenever I posed this question in my plant science classes, most students thought I was joking. They presumed that plants grow only during the daytime, when the plants are photosynthesizing. If you’re like them, then it may…
Plant Growth = Plant Cell Enlargement. The tallest trees in the world are the California coast redwood trees (Sequoia sempervirens), which can grow to over 100 meters (328 feet) tall. That’s higher than a 30-story building. These huge trees can grow so big mainly because their growing cells can enlarge…
Out-Of-Control Plants? A couple of reports in the science news a few years ago seemed to suggest that one way to cope with global climate change may be unbridled plant growth. One such report involved the discovery of a cellular regulator for the synthesis of cellulose by plant cells. The…
“..And all the leaves on the trees are falling To the sound of the breezes that blow…”– Van Morrison How Can I Miss You, If You Won’t Go Away? Ah, November in the Pacific Northwest, when the autumn leaves are being scoured from the trees by blustery winds and driving…
How Plants Work….For Us Back in the day, if I was teaching botany or plant physiology, I’d typically start off the first-class with reasons why the students should care about plants. (Sad, but true.) Besides reminding them that the air they breathed and the food they consumed (even if they…
To make complex organisms takes specialized cells. Animals and flowering plants require specialized cells with distinct abilities in order to accomplish higher order functions – such as vision or flowering. It’s somewhat like a symphony orchestra. The orchestra integrates different musicians playing different instruments. The characteristic sounds of the instruments…
I’m Melting!! Remember the melting witch in The Wizard of Oz? What if corn stalks, for instance, could be induced to “melt” – that is, to go from tough biomass into a sugary puddle? In biochemical terms, it would be the equivalent to the conversion of cellulosic biomass into a…