Plant-Microbe Symbiosis – From Agriculture to Evolution. For April 2017, we apparently have another common theme among the most retweeted plant news stories, namely, plant-associated microorganisms. “‘While agriculture should certainly learn from nature, we mustn’t be fixated on it. After all, agriculture and nature are fundamentally different.’” Agriculture should not…
From RNA to DNA. Though plant molecular biology seems to be where most of the plant science action (and interest) is these days, some of the favorite plant science news stories in March 2017 included plant morphology, plant microscopy and plant archeology. But the most popular story had to do…
From “Heavy Metal” Plants to Plant Clocks. A common theme for the most popular plant news stories from my February, 2017 HPW Twitter feed appears to be evolution – from the genes involved in the evolution of parasitic plants to common evolutionary traits of carnivorous plants. And the most popular…
Happy New Year! And the Winners Are…. For the past five years, I’ve started the new year here at the How Plants Work blog by taking a look back at the previous year’s plant-related news from my HPW Twitter feed and sharing a few of the “tastier” tidbits, month-by-month. This…
Size Does Matter (If You’re Growing Giant Pumpkins) Since it’s that time of year again, here’s an updated post originally published in 2015. Question: What does a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle and the current World Record Giant Pumpkin have in common? Answer: They each weigh about 1 ton (US) or about…
On Death and Dicamba. About a year ago the recent controversy over the increased spraying of the herbicide Dicamba on midwest U.S. farms took a turn for the worse. Unfortunately, it involved alleged murder. You can listen to an excellent account of the story here: …and/or read about the story…
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…
Genes As Parasites? Yikes, has it really been over 40 years since the publication of The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins? Indeed it has! (Please see Ref. 1 below.) This landmark book was very controversial when it was first published because it depicted biological organisms basically as “vehicles” for the…
Proprioception: sensing of the posture, shape and relative orientation of body parts Are Plants Self-Aware? No, I’m NOT referring to plant self-awareness as it relates to plant “consciousness”. (If you’re interested in such metaphysical aspects of plant physiology, please see here, for example.) What I’m referring to is the notion…
When No Really Means No (In Plants) When it comes to sexual reproduction, nearly half of all flowering plant species are self-incompatible. That is, the pollen (male parts of flowers) produced by an individual plant is somehow recognized by the plant and rendered ineffectual in self-fertilizing the ovules (female parts…