Archive for the ‘Botany’ Category
It is often said that trees and plants in general, are the lungs of the planet, but a new discovery can now say that they can also play an important role in the electrification of the atmosphere.It has long been suspected that there was a link between trees and electricity. Now, with that finding, seems to have discovered the mechanism that finally allows the striking activity of the trees.
The team of Rohan Jayaratne and Xuan Ling, the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH), led by Professor Lidia Morawska of Queensland University of Technology, Australia, conducted experiments in six locations Brisbane area. The researchers found that concentrations of positive and negative ions in the air were two times higher in the hardwood forest areas in turf areas, such as parks.
The explanation given to the phenomenon is as follows:
Under normal conditions as those present in the sites examined for the new study, the natural ions that are in the air are created primarily by ionization through two basic processes: radiation from radon, a gas present in very small amounts in the air and cosmic radiation from space. Read the rest of this entry »
Spend all day in the sun is dangerous not only for humans but also to plants, they can not move your site. The sun’s ultraviolet radiation can damage proteins and DNA from the cells, causing poor growth and even death. However, the plants have developed some powerful adaptive defenses, including a complex series of protective responses orchestrated by a protein known as UVR8 and reacts to ultraviolet radiation.
Now, scientists from the Scripps Research Institute in United States and the University of Glasgow in United Kingdom have reconstructed in detail the structure of the protein UVR8 and its inner workings.
Know how acts this archaic protein, which seems to play a key role in vegetables, help the scientific community to better understand how changes in the solar lighting, such as those caused by climatic variations, do vary the growth of a plant, such as Professor Elizabeth Getzoff highlights of that institute. Read the rest of this entry »
An international team of scientists has sequenced the genome of the legume Medicago truncatula, and in the process these experts have found that the genes that control plant symbiotic relationships with fungi and bacteria can be traced evolutionarily until about 60 million years.
The team, led by botanist Nevin Young, recently completed its work for several years to map the genome of Medicago truncatula, a plant that scientists use as a model to study the biology of important food legumes such as soybeans (or soybeans), alfalfa and peas (peas).
The project’s objective was to document how it evolved the symbiosis that allows the process used legumes such as Medicago to produce their own nitrogen fertilizer through the association with special bacteria. Read the rest of this entry »
The cultivation of sweet potato on board a spacecraft might be useful as a source of food for astronauts if they get the plant to grow up little place.
This may have been achieved thanks to the work of Cary Mitchell, professor of horticulture at Purdue University, helped by Gioia Massa, an expert in the same specialty. Both, with funding from NASA, have developed methods to achieve growth of sweet potato occupies a smaller area, but no decrease in the amount of food that each plant produces.
Potato plants tend to spread horizontally, occupying a large amount of surface, which is not acceptable if you want to grow them inside a spaceship. Read the rest of this entry »
Concerns about global warming and its impact on our environment have prompted an intense worldwide scientific research aimed at reducing levels of atmospheric carbon that humans release into the air.
Now, researchers at the Tel Aviv University are making a bold and promising contribution to the cause by planting shrubs successfully in forests unlikely place: inside the Arava Desert in Israel.
Using only elements of that environment, such as species of local plants, recycled wastewater unsuitable for agriculture and arid lands not suitable for sustaining agricultural crops, a group of researchers including Amram Eshel and Aviah Zilberstein Read the rest of this entry »
The catastrophic floods, such as those in recent years have affected Pakistan or Bangladesh, and parts of many other countries, have often ruined crops. The degree of tolerance of crops to the situation is fully or partially submerged in water is a critical factor in global food security.
Deprived of oxygen, agricultural crops can not survive for long in a land flooded. Now it has some insight into how plants detect low oxygen levels and activate strategies that help them survive the floods. This finding could lead to the production of high yielding crops, tolerant to flooding, benefiting farmers and consumers around the world. Read the rest of this entry »
An article in the CSIC different attitudes recorded the species, which vary depending on the rest of the community. Esparto, for example, hinders the growth of albardin but favors the everlasting abode.
Different plant species in a community are not related by a hierarchical network established on the basis of their competitive ability, as demonstrated by an investigation of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). The study reveals that a single plant can hinder the growth of a species while facilitating the other.
The research, published in the PLoS ONE journal, analyzed the behavior of 10 species of perennial plants in controlled conditions for one year. It forced the growth of pairs of plants of the same species and different species in close contact, overlapping roots. Read the rest of this entry »
Surprisingly, some plants grow faster, reach larger sizes than normal, and reproduce more successfully, having been partially eaten by herbivores.
Researchers have discovered that one of the secrets of success of these plants face of adversity is its ability to duplicate their chromosomes over and over again without undergoing cell division.
Although this process, called endoreduplication, is not new to science, no previous study had examined in relation to the seemingly miraculous explosion of growth and reproductive potential that occurs in many plants having been partially meals. Read the rest of this entry »
Rice, which accounts for almost half of daily calories consumed by the world’s population, could be adapted to global climate change through the colonization of the seeds or plants by fungal spores are tiny naturally present in some ecosystems under extreme environmental conditions. This conclusion was reached by a research team led from the USGS (the U.S. Geological Survey).
In an effort to explore ways to increase the adaptive capacity of rice to the adversities promoted by climate change have already begun to cause a decline in rice production, researchers at the USGS and its partners settled two commercial varieties of rice with fungal spores that exist naturally in certain plants native to coastal ecosystems (with tolerance to high salinity) and within certain ecosystems native plants geothermal (tolerant to extreme heat). Read the rest of this entry »
The coconut palm fruit, Cocos Nucifera has been very helpful throughout the human history of maritime navigation because of its multiple uses. A source of high-calorie foods, water, and fiber to make rope and a hard shell that can be converted into charcoal. And until it is needed for any of these applications, it serves as a flotation device.
The history of the coconut is so intertwined with the history of sailors, Kenneth M. Olsen, a biologist specializing in plant evolution, from Washington University in St. Louis, did not expect to find a clear geographic structure with regard to the genetics of the coconut, when he and his colleagues set out to examine the DNA of more than 1,300 coconuts from all over the world.
It was easy to assume that no longer perceive any specific origin, due to the highly homogenized the coconut has become for the carriage of varieties from one place to another by sailors throughout history. Read the rest of this entry »