As days grow colder and shorter, and many of us find ourselves entrenched in winter, you wouldn’t be mistaken for feeling a noticeable reduction in activity around you. However, in certain crops such as winter wheat and barley, this cold…
Read More
Researchers have studied how certain bacteria perform photosynthesis using low-energy light, which could be engineered into crops to boost production. By studying the way two bacteria perform the difficult chemistry of photosynthesis, a team has discovered the trade-offs they make…
Read More
Researchers have identified a new reason to protect mangrove forests: they’ve been quietly keeping carbon out of Earth’s atmosphere for the past 5,000 years.
Read More
A new banana fungus is rapidly spreading across the globe. It hit Africa a decade ago, and now spreads, a genetic study reveals. They state that the disease poses a threat to Africa’s food security.
Read More
Scientists use genomic data to resolve the phylogeny of zygnematophyte algae and pinpoint several emergences of multicellularity in the closest known relatives of terrestrial plants.
Read More
Scientists have sequenced the oldest plant genome using 6,000-year-old seeds from a watermelon relative collected at an archaeological site in the Sahara Desert in Libya.
Read More
Hidden beneath the delicate, red skin and juicy flesh of a tomato is a wealth of nutrients and genetic makeup. With recent research on the first genome of a species in the tomatillo tribe (part of the tomato family), we…
Read More
The maximum summer temperature and the amount of rainfall in summer are the two climate factors that determine the type of native grass that grows in a region, Australian researchers have found in a recent study.
Read More
When we think of plants, the phrase “stressed out" doesn't typically come to mind. They are, after all, exempt from paying bills and tackling existential questions. However, environmental changes—both living (biotic) and nonliving (abiotic)—generate significant stressors for plants. New methods…
Read More
Plants lengthen and bend to secure access to sunlight. Despite observing this phenomenon for centuries, scientists do not fully understand it. Now, scientists have discovered that two plant factors -- the protein PIF7 and the growth hormone auxin -- are…
Read More
