Category

Climate change

Arabidopsis thaliana flower

How plants respond to heat stress

By | Climate change, News, Plant Science

Feeling the heat: Steroid hormones contribute to the heat stress resistance of plants. Plants, like other organisms, can be severely affected by heat stress. To increase their chances of survival, they activate the heat shock response, a molecular pathway also employed by human and animal cells for stress protection. Researchers have now discovered that plant steroid hormones can promote this response in plants.

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Shoots and roots respond differently to climate change

By | Climate change, News

Most organisms follow a timetable – when to reproduce, when to migrate, so on so forth! The timing of such key periodic life events is known as phenology and is crucial for organism’s survival and their contributions to ecosystem functions. One of the most reported responses of organisms to contemporary climate change is shifts in their phenology. Ecologists have already shown that phenology of many plants are advancing due to climate change, for instance, many plants are flowering earlier during the growing season. But little was known how plant phenological changes aboveground matches with plant phenological changes belowground due to climate change.

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