exploring the inner workings of plants
Posted in Plant Hormones on Mar 5th, 2010
Plant Cut-Backs “Pruning is one of the most important cultural practices for maintaining woody plants, including ornamental trees and shrubs, fruits and nuts. It involves both art and science: art in making the pruning cuts properly, and science in knowing how and when to prune for maximum benefits.” (from ref. 1 below) Briefly, the main [...]
Posted in Plant Hormones on Dec 25th, 2009
Sniffing Out Ethylene In the previous postprevious post I summarized the latest information on how the plant hormone ethylene is made (at least in the model plant Arabidopsis). Though most people are familiar with the plant hormone ethylene mainly because of its effects on fruit ripening, the list of plant responses to ethylene is long. [...]
Posted in Plant Hormones on Dec 3rd, 2009
C’est un gaz. Es un gas. Es ist ein gas. It’s a Gas! If you are familiar with the gaseous plant hormone ethylene, it’s most likely because of its ability to promote fruit ripening in apples, bananas, tomatoes, etc.. Ethylene also affects many other aspects of a plant’s life cycle, including seed germination, growth and [...]
Posted in Plant Hormones on Nov 19th, 2009
Fried Green Tomatoes About this time of year in the North Temperate Zone people may be getting very tired of fried green tomatoes and green tomato pie. As a plant physiologist, I was often asked how to ripen green tomatoes. (Rather than go into this here, I’ll refer you to this recent blogpost.) You probably [...]
Posted in Plant Hormones on May 1st, 2009
What Do Suburban Lawns and the Vietnam War Have in Common? Answer: The herbicide 2,4-D. You may be familiar with this herbicide as an active ingredient in “Weed ‘n Feed®”, “Weed B Gon MAX®”, Turf Builder® With Weed Control”, etc.. During the Vietnam War, it was an active ingredient in Agent Orange. On lawns it’s [...]
Posted in CO2, Photosynthesis, Plant Hormones, Plant Stress on Feb 12th, 2009
As previously mentioned….if most climatologists are correct, then parts of the Earth’s surface may experience increasing episodes of heat and drought as a result of global “weirding”. (see here for a current example) Some of the effects of heat on photosynthesis was considered in part 1 of this post. But what about drought (a.k.a., long [...]
Posted in Plant Development, Plant Hormones on Dec 30th, 2008
The Power of Movement in Plants Most of a flowering plant’s development and physiology is regulated by plant hormones. The first of these chemical signals to be isolated and characterized was auxin. In the 1930′s, after the initial discovery of auxin by Frits Went in 1928, he, Kenneth Thimann, and Folke Skoog showed that, in [...]
Posted in Plant Hormones on Dec 14th, 2008
What do a fungal disease of rice, dwarf plants, flowering, and beer have in common? Answer: They all may involve the action of the plant hormone gibberellin, a.k.a. gibberellic acid (GA). Let me explain….. This plant hormone was first discovered by Japanese scientists working on a rice disease called bakanae caused by the fungus Gibberella [...]
Posted in Plant Hormones, Senescence (Aging) on Oct 24th, 2008
Much can be found online about why leaves change colors in the fall… …but relatively little about the final part of the story, namely leaf drop. Components of this terminal process, called leaf abscission, are actually put into place at the beginning of the leaf’s life. At the end, a chemical signal from the leaf [...]
Posted in Plant Hormones on Sep 11th, 2008
What if the roots of flowering plants produced chemical signals that regulated the branching of their shoots? Chemical signals used by plants to regulate their development and physiology are called plant hormones. Very small amounts of these compounds, acting alone or in tandem, often elicit dramatic effects on plant development. For many years there were [...]
HowPlantsWork Weblog
exploring the inner workings of plants
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