A plant used in traditional Chinese medicine has evolved to become less visible to humans, new research shows. Scientists found that Fritillaria delavayi plants, which live on rocky slopes of China’s Hengduan mountains, match their backgrounds most closely in areas where they are heavily harvested.
The rubber-based agroforestry systems have been recently established to provide a promising solution for the sustainable development of rubber cultivation. However, the water relations between rubber trees and the intercrops remain poorly understood.
Researchers generated genome sequences for nearly 600 green millet plants and released a very high quality reference S. viridis genome sequence. Analysis of these plant genome sequences also led researchers to identify a gene related to seed dispersal in wild populations for the first time.
Plants are able to keep growing indefinitely because they have tissues made of meristems–plant stem cells–which have the unique ability to transform themselves into the various specialized cells that make up the plant, dividing whenever appropriate and producing new cells of whatever type as needed. Meristems exist at the tips of all plants, allowing them to grow new stems or new roots, and, in trees, also in the trunk, where they add extra girth.
Rhamnella in the family of Rhamnaceae is a small genus. To date, 10 species have been accepted into this genus. In field investigations, researchers found two Rhamnella populations from southwest Guangxi that belonged to the evergreen group but could not be ascribed to any of the evergreen Rhamnella species.
