How do some plants arrange their leaves in a whorl (e.g., see photo left) in order maximize sunlight exposure, and, thus, photosynthesis? And how is it that plants consume stored energy in the form of starch at just the right rate so as to last them through the night? To…
The Ups and Downs of Plant Growth What environmental factors have the most important effects on plant development? When I posed this question to students in class (back in the day when I was boring college undergraduates), it typically took quite a while before someone finally said “Gravity!”. (I usually…
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…
The Hourglass Model It’s easy to see how plants and animals differ in many, many ways at the whole-organism level. (see previous posts here and here, for example.) But at the cellular level, plants and animals are quite similar (mainly because they share a common eukaryotic cell ancestor). New scientific…
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…
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…