Archive for the ‘Botany’ Category
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 »
The results of a new study could change the concept that scientists have about how some plants are oriented toward the light.
The process, called phototropism, is well documented in some vegetables, but has proved difficult to understand well in dicotyledonous plants, a large group of flowering plants which include many agricultural crops.
Charles Darwin and his son Francis described the phototropism at the end of the 19th century, based on experiments in which prevented the light to reach the tips of the shoots of the plants and avoided so these vegetables are oriented towards the light. Their work led to the discovery of auxin, a plant hormone that controls the functions of growth. Read the rest of this entry »
The plants are adapted to local conditions of climate and soil where they grow, and it is known that these adaptations to the environment for thousands of years evolve as mutations that accumulate little by little in their genetic code. Now it has been discovered that at least in some plants these adaptations can arise almost instantly, not by a change in DNA sequence, but simply by duplication of existing genetic material.
While almost all animals have two sets of chromosomes, one of maternal origin and one of paternal origin, many plants are polyploid, which means they have four or more sets of chromosomes. The exact role that the polyploid condition has on the ability of a wild plant to survive environmental changes noticeable to colonize new habitats or had not been examined by experiments as stringent as those now made in a new study. Read the rest of this entry »