exploring the inner workings of plants
Posted in Flowering, Plant Metabolism on Jan 16th, 2010
“Hot Plants?” In the previous post, the topic was how plants survive the cold. Although some perennial plants can withstand winter temperatures well below zero (F), plants certainly don’t generate body heat like mammals do in order to warm themselves. Or do they? There are a few plants in nature, like the remarkable Voodoo Lily [...]
Posted in Flowering on Nov 7th, 2009
It’s Time to Flower! The correct timing of flowering is essential to maximize reproductive success in angiosperms. And many flowering plants rely on the photoperiod (specifically, the relative night length) as an environmental signal to tell seasonal time. (To see how, please see previous posts about How Plants Tell Time and Why Plants Tell Time.) [...]
Posted in Flowering on Oct 25th, 2009
The Long and Winding Road So far, this journey through the subject of how plants make flowers has consisted of three parts: Part 1, an introduction to the flowering hormone florigen, …Part 2, how environmental cues affect flowering, ..and, Part 3, how the size and age of the plant itself may trigger flowering. The Players [...]
Posted in Flowering on Oct 6th, 2009
Is There a Single Flower-Inducing Hormone? Florigen is the signal that triggers the transition from vegetative to reproductive development in plants that flower in response to photoperiod. But some plants, that I’ll refer to “Night-Neutral” (a.k.a., “Day-Neutral”), apparently initiate flowering because of factors other than night length. Such plants may flower after attaining a certain [...]
Posted in Flowering on Sep 19th, 2009
Many Plants Flower in Response to Night Length For nearly 100 years scientists have been trying to identify the elusive flowering hormone called florigen. Early in the last century two USDA researchers took a major step toward this by discovering how to induce flowering in plants under controlled conditions. In 1920, these two scientists, W.W. [...]
Posted in Flowering on Sep 13th, 2009
The Mystery of the Flowering Hormone What if you discovered a chemical that, when sprayed onto the leaves of plants, would induce them to flower? How much do you think the patent on such a chemical would be worth? Especially to the agricultural and horticultural industries. And what if I told you that scientific evidence [...]
Posted in Flowering, Plant Development on May 30th, 2009
Getting a Grip Ever wonder how a bee or a butterfly can land on a flower and not fall off? Me neither. But thanks to researchers in the UK, we now have another reason why flowers are so marvelous. Flowering plants have evolved chemical signals to attract pollinators to their flowers. Such signals include volatile [...]
Posted in Flowering on Apr 24th, 2009
The First Flower? How did flowering plants (angiosperms) evolve from non-flowering seed plants (gymnosperms)? Or did they? When did the first flower appear on this planet? And where on Earth did it occur? These are some of the most hotly debated questions among botanists today. Partly because some of the fossil data is at odds [...]
Posted in Flowering, Plant Biological Clock, Plant Development on Feb 5th, 2009
Last time we had a taste of HOW plants tell time. But what, if any, are the adaptive advantages to plants for doing so? It has long been presumed that the ability to anticipate day/night cycles gives organisms a fitness advantage. For example, this would allow plants to anticipate daylight and adjust their photosynthetic metabolism [...]
Posted in Flowering, Secondary Compounds on Nov 30th, 2008
The eye of a honey bee (photo credits). Flowers look very different to insect pollinators, such as honey bees, compared to what we mammals see. As the photo on the left shows, bees have compound eyes. How a bee sees patterns as a result of its compound eyes is wonderfully illustrated at Andy Giger’s B-Eye [...]
HowPlantsWork Weblog
exploring the inner workings of plants
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