exploring the inner workings of plants
Posted in The Neighbors on Oct 11th, 2009
Leaf Surfaces = Microbial Habitats Imagine all the leaves of all the plants currently living on planet Earth. Now, add up all the surface areas of all of those leaves. And your answer is?… No idea?…. Luckily, some microbiologists have made an estimate, and it’s an astounding number. According to a current review (see ref [...]
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 Photosynthesis, Plant Stress, Secondary Compounds on Nov 24th, 2008
Can humans measure photosynthesis on a global scale? Since plants consume CO2 during photosynthesis, one way is to measure the relative amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) using satellites (click on photo at left for more info). But plants also release CO2 as a product of respiration. This has confounded efforts to accurately measure photosynthesis [...]
Posted in Flowering on Nov 11th, 2008
Plant memory? Can some plants access past experiences so that this information can be incorporated into new responses, such as flowering? The answer is yes! (as illustrated in the photo on the the left). This picture shows a cabbage plant that was grown for five years in the laboratory of Dr. Rick Amasino. (For size [...]
Posted in The Neighbors on Oct 12th, 2008
Mushrooms are the visible manifestations (sexual organs, actually) of microscopic, soil-dwelling fungi that form mutually-beneficial partnerships with plants. Since these filamentous fungi interact with the roots of plants, such symbiotic relationships are called mycorrhizae, literally “fungus root”. Fossil evidence supports the idea that these plant-fungal partnerships are as old as the emergence of terrestrial plants [...]
Posted in CO2, Photosynthesis on Oct 4th, 2008
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are rising faster than the worst-case scenario postulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ). In the past 250 years the amount of atmospheric CO2 has increased by over 35% (from 280 to 383 ppm), due mainly to human activities such as deforestation and the burning of fossil [...]
Posted in Secondary Compounds on Sep 26th, 2008
Nearly 2 billion people will eat a chili pepper today, mainly because of their pungent flavor, that is, their peppery heat. This perceived heat is caused by a chemical called capsaicin. Capsaicin and other capsaicinoids, found mainly in the pepper’s fleshy tissue which holds the seeds (see below right), activates heat-sensation-related receptors in the mammalian [...]
Posted in Flowering, Secondary Compounds on Sep 5th, 2008
Sex. Animals do it. And plants do it, too. To enhance sex (cross-pollination), the flowers of some plants not only produce chemical pigments (colors) and sugary nectar to attract pollinators, but also volatile chemicals (scents) to do the same. In addition to these chemical attractants, flowers may also produce chemical repellents, such as nicotine (see [...]
HowPlantsWork Weblog
exploring the inner workings of plants
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