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Categories: Biology: Botany, Paleontology: Dinosaurs

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A new database of weeds that can help scientists understand how traditional agricultural systems were managed throughout history, could also provide insights into how global trends like the climate crisis could affect the resilience of our modern day food systems.

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Ecologists have long known that standing dead trees, commonly referred to as snags, are an important habitat element for forest dwellers and act as a driver of biodiversity. They're so important that in some managed forests, snag creation is part of the conservation tool kit -- i.e., crews sometimes convert a percentage of live trees into dead ones through techniques ranging from sawing off their tops to wounding their trunks to injecting them with disease-causing fungi.

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With disease and high demand posing threats to the world's primary natural rubber supply in Southeast Asia, scientists are working to ramp up the U.S. rubber market by advancing methods to extract latex from two sustainable North American plant sources: a dandelion species and a desert shrub.

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Of all the organisms that photosynthesize, land plants have the most complex form. How did this morphology emerge? A team of scientists has taken a deep dive into the evolutionary history of morphological complexity in streptophytes, which include land plants and many green algae. Their research allowed them to go back in time to investigate lineages that emerged long before land plants existed.

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Gliding winged-reptiles were amongst the ancient crocodile residents of the Mendip Hills in Somerset, England, researchers at the have revealed.

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An international team of researchers has uncovered a remarkable genetic phenomenon in lycophytes, which are similar to ferns and among the oldest land plants. Their study reveals that these plants have maintained a consistent genetic structure for over 350 million years, a significant deviation from the norm in plant genetics.

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Scientists have known about a particular organelle in plant cells for over a century. However, scientists have only now discovered that organelle's key role in aging.

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Fake plants are moving into the 21st century! Researchers developed literal 'power plants' -- tiny, leaf-shaped generators that create electricity from a blowing breeze or falling raindrops. The team tested the energy harvesters by incorporating them into artificial plants.

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Female moths primarily use their sense of smell to find the best host plants on which to lay their eggs, with the deterrent effect of caterpillar feces playing an important role, according to new research.

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Climate change is causing Western U.S. forests to be less effective carbon sinks, even as it boosts the productivity of forests in the Eastern U.S., according to new research.

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The so-called Rice Yellow Mottle Virus (for short: RYMV) is responsible for high crop losses in Africa, particularly among small-scale farmers. A research team has now produced rice lines that are resistant to the disease by means of genome editing. The rice varieties are a preliminary step toward being able to generate resistant locally adapted elite varieties for small-scale food producers in Africa.

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Some invasive plants can form persistent banks of seeds that remain under the soil for years, and this makes their eradication practically impossible. Over time, this invisible population of large quantities of living, buried plants -- in seed form -- will reoccupy ecosystems and displace the typical flora of the natural environment.

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Water samples from 20 sites were tested using a panel of immortalized human cell lines corresponding to the liver, kidney and brain to measure cytotoxicity. Results show that each control toxin induced a consistent pattern of cytotoxicity in the panel of human cell lines assayed. Known toxins were seen only during blooms. Because cell toxicity was seen in the absence of blooms, it suggests that there might be either emergent toxins or a combination of toxins present at those times. Findings suggest that other toxins with the potential to be harmful to human health may be present in the lagoon.

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Picrodontids -- an extinct family of placental mammals that lived several million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs -- are not primates as previously believed.

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Researchers discovered that plants manage iron deficiency without helping 'bad' bacteria thrive by eliminating the molecular signal for iron deficiency, and that the iron deficiency signaling pathway and the plant immune system are deeply intertwined. Their findings provide a new target for boosting plant resilience in the face of climate change, and offer new insight into plant and animal microbiomes.

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Researchers have found almost identical patterns of tree diversity across the world's tropical forests. The study of over one million trees across 1,568 locations found that just 2.2% of tree species make up 50% of the total number of trees in tropical forests across Africa, the Amazon, and Southeast Asia. Each continent consists of the same proportion of a few common species and many rare species.

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New research delves into the intricate defense mechanisms of tomatoes against the notorious bacterial pathogen, Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato (Pst). It's a classic tale of nature's arms race: as pathogens evolve to outsmart plant defenses, plants counter with more sophisticated immune responses.

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Scientists have engineered the microbiome of plants for the first time, boosting the prevalence of 'good' bacteria that protect the plant from disease. The findings could substantially reduce the need for environmentally destructive pesticides.

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Honey yields in the U.S. have been declining since the 1990s, with honey producers and scientists unsure why, but a new study has uncovered clues in the mystery of the missing honey.

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Chlorophyll plays a pivotal role in photosynthesis, which is why plants have evolved to have high chlorophyll levels in their leaves. However, making this pigment is expensive because plants invest a significant portion of the available nitrogen in both chlorophyll and the special proteins that bind it. As a result, nitrogen is unavailable for other processes. In a new study, researchers reduced the chlorophyll levels in leaves to see if the plant would invest the nitrogen saved into other process that might improve nutritional quality.