New research has discovered how natural responses to stress in plants modify the way DNA is wrapped up in the cell to help it withstand the adverse effects that climate change has on its growth.
While rain is essential for the survival of plants, it also contains bacteria and other pathogens which can cause them harm. So how do plants protect themselves from this threat?
Life on Earth runs in 24-hour cycles. From tiny bacteria to human beings, organisms adapt to alterations of day and night. External factors, such as changes in light and temperature, are needed to entrain the clock. Many metabolic processes are controlled by the endogenous clock. Scientists have now studied the molecular rhythms of the endogenous clock in the “green lineage”.
Drugs that inhibit plant immune responses by blocking key signaling pathways could enable novel approaches to genome editing.
An international team of scientists has used neutron reflectometry techniques to understand how disease-causing pathogens damage the cell membranes of plants.
Cowpea is an important crop in many parts of the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa. It is resilient and can grow in areas with little rainfall and low-quality soils. But as hardy as it is, cowpea yields can decrease by drought and low levels of soil phosphorus.
Researchers have overlooked especially minuscule gene fragments that are critical to the assembly of cellular machinery and could help better trace the evolutionary history of plants, says a new study.
The carnivorous Venus flytrap can be anaesthetised with ether. Some surprising parallels to anaesthesia in humans emerge.
Researchers examine the formation of air channels in wetland plants, a protective trait that makes them resilient to environmental stresses.
How does a developing plant shoot know how, where, and when to grow? Dividing cells need to pass messages from one another to coordinate growth. In plants, important messages are packaged into RNA, which are sent from cell to cell. By studying Arabidopsis thaliana, researchers found that RNA messages need a special protein to escort them where they need to go. Without this escort, cells cannot coordinate and the plant fails to develop properly.
