“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…
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 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…
From Cocoa CRISPR to Artificial Plant Cells CRISPR is the latest “tool” in the plant molecular biology “toolbox”, and it’s being applied to many crops, including cocoa trees, as we saw in May 2018. Other plant science news from last May included reports of new information regarding plant interactions with…
From “Talking” Trees To The Origin of Plant Hormones. The plant science news of March 2018 began with a recent (but a somewhat unfortunate, in my view) trend of mysticism somehow creeping into scientific studies of plant physiology. (Think plant consciousness. Or that plants possess some sort of “secret wisdom”.)…
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…
What This Book Is….And Isn’t. The original version of this ebook started out, in 2013, as a compilation of some blog posts from this website. In linking these posts together, I found I needed to expand and update a lot of the information, which resulted in the first edition. Plant…
From Plant Secrets To Plant Antibiotics What were the five most re-tweeted and favorited plant news stories that I shared in September of last year? Well, here they are, in order of popularity, lowest to highest. “Scientists from the John Innes Centre have pioneered innovative new cell imaging techniques to…