People often thing of flowers as a bright and showy splash of contrasting colors. But some plant species actually produce two types of flowers: normal ones with a colorful appearance, and “runts” that are small, never open. Why do some plants produce small and unattractive flowers? Two researchers think they’ve figured out why, supporting a hypothesis dating back 150 years to Charles Darwin.
Agriculture plays a key role towards providing food for the planet but it is also expected to be one of the world’s most impacted areas from climate change. Improving photosynthesis might be our best option to achieve global food security and researchers know how to do it.
New techniques allow live-observation of forming cell walls in the vascular tissue. The so-called xylem, also known as wood, is a network of hollow cells with extremely strong cell walls that reinforce the cells against the mechanical conflicts arising from growing tall. These walls wrap around the cells in filigree band and spiral patterns. So far, it is only partly known, how these patterns are created. Scientists recently study the formation of such reinforced and patterned cell walls.
In northern Canada, the forest floor is carpeted with reindeer lichens. They look like a moss made of tiny gray branches, but they’re stranger than that: they’re composite organisms, a fungus and algae living together as one. They’re a major part of reindeer diets, hence the name, and the forest depends on them to move nutrients through the ecosystem. They also, at least in parts of Quebec, are having a lot more sex than scientists expected. In a new study researchers found that the reindeer lichens they examined have unexpected levels of genetic diversity, indicating that the lichens have been doing more gene-mixing with each other than the scientists would have guessed.
New research has revealed how an invasion of the alien evergreen tree, Prosopis juliflora seriously diminishes water resources in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, consuming enough of this already scarce resource to irrigate cotton and sugarcane generating some US$ 320 million and US$ 470 million net benefits per year.
A team of Ethiopian, South African and Swiss scientists, including lead author Dr Hailu Shiferaw, Dr Tena Alamirew, and Dr Gete Zeleke from the Water and Land Resource Centre of Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and Dr Sebinasi Dzikiti from Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and Dr Urs Schaffner, Head Ecosystems Management, CABI, have been assessing water use of prosopis and its impacts on catchment water budget and rural livelihoods in the dry Afar Region of Ethiopia, since 2015 as part of a long-term collaboration in the framework of the CABI-led Woody Weeds project.
Their new study, published in Scientific Reports, provides evidence that this alien tree, which has invaded both the floodplains of the Awash River and the surrounding dryland habitats, uses excessive amounts of water by consuming approximately 3.1-3.3 billion m3/yr of water throughout the year in the Afar Region.
Dr Shiferaw said, “We found that single trees of the evergreen prosopis consume between 1-36 liters of water per day, depending on stem diameter and site conditions. Prosopis trees not only use water throughout the year, but even consume more water during the dry season, when almost all native plants have shed their leaves. The high sap flow of prosopis in the drylands throughout the year may be due to exceptionally deep roots that penetrate up to 50m below the surface, where they tap into groundwater that cannot be used by native trees with shorter roots.”
In the context of climate change and an increasing frequency of drought events in dry regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, the report concludes that this invasive tree is likely to have serious consequences for sustainable livelihoods in the region unless its spread is contained and its density reduced.
Dr Urs Schaffner, senior author and Head Ecosystems Management at CABI in Switzerland, said, “Since its introduction in the Afar Region in the 1980s, prosopis has invaded 1.2 million ha of land. Thus, unless the spread of prosopis is contained and the density reduced in areas where it has become established, this invasive tree is likely to have serious consequences for sustainable livelihoods in the region. The estimated net benefits from water savings alone would strongly justify the implementation of a coordinated control programme.”
The report clearly supports findings from work undertaken in South Africa on water use by invasive tree species. Prof Brian van Wilgen from Stellenbosch University, South Africa, previous scientific advisor to the ‘Working for Water’ programme in South Africa and partner of the Woody Weeds project, said, “In South Africa, invasive alien trees are estimated to reduce surface water runoff by between 1.5 and 2.5 billion m3 per year, and this could increase substantially as the invasions continue to spread. In addition, invasive trees in drier parts of the country have substantially reduced water in groundwater aquifers on which local farmers and towns are totally reliant.”
He further explained that, “These losses have serious consequences for a country where water scarcity limits economic activity and growth. The government in South Africa has responded by creating a multi-million dollar, national-scale programme, dubbed ‘Working for Water’, to control invasive alien trees, and has also passed legislation preventing further propagation of invasive alien trees and requiring landowners to control them.”
Read the paper: Scientific Reports
Article source: CABI
Image: Prosopis juliflora. Credit: CABI.
The origin of flowering plants famously puzzled Charles Darwin, who described their sudden appearance in the fossil record from relatively recent geological times as an “abominable mystery”. This mystery has further deepened with an inexplicable discrepancy between the relatively recent fossil record and a much older time of origin of flowering plants estimated using genome data.
A research team that developed a biosensor that first recorded that a distinct gradient of the plant growth hormone gibberellin correlated with plant cell size has now revealed how this distribution pattern is created in roots.
Climate change may challenge organismal responses through not only extreme cues. An uncommon combination of benign cues – warm and short days – can also trigger reactions such as misregulations of leaves.
Researchers grow structures made of wood-like plant cells in a lab, hinting at the possibility of more efficient biomaterials production. Still in its early stages, the idea is akin in some ways to cultured meat — an opportunity to streamline the production of biomaterials.
Tomatoes are one of the most popular types of fresh produce consumed worldwide, as well as being an important ingredient in many manufactured foods. As with other cultivated crops, some potentially useful genes that were present in its South American ancestors were lost during domestication and breeding of the modern tomato, Solanum lycopersicum var. lycopersicum. Because of its importance as a crop, the tomato genome sequence was completed and published as long ago as 2012, with later additions and improvements. Now researchers have produced high-quality genome sequences of two wild ancestors of tomato from Peru, Solanum pimpinellifolium and Solanum lycopersicum var. cerasiforme.
