Plants

You didn’t think plants were conscious, did you? Did you really think salad is murder? Yet telling us that plants are not conscious is the gist of a recently published major paper in Trends in Plant Science. (open access) Part of the background to the “plants think like people” movement in science, which they oppose, is that we have learned over the years that plants communicate a lot. The other part is refusal to acknowledge that humans are exceptional. Quite simply, the need to see humans as equivalent to animals has now spread to the need to see us as equivalent to plants. We can expect many more such conundrums. They will result in further declarations in science journals that Read More ›

The plant, Hibiscadelphus woodii, was formally discovered in 1991 and had been declared extinct in 2016: In 2016, the same year the plant was listed extinct, the National Tropical Botanical Garden teamed up with drone operator Ben Nyberg to supplement the work of intrepid scientists like Wood, who rappel down cliffs and trudge through rainforests to conserve plants. In January, National Geographic reports, Nyberg saw what looked like a Hibiscadelphus woodii plant while surveying via drone… The following month, Nyberg and Wood hiked 700 feet into the valley, according to Quartz. Unable to go further, they flew a drone 800 feet deeper into the ravine. The image the drone transmitted back to their portable monitor confirmed their hopes: living Hibiscadelphus Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It isn’t easy being green. It takes thousands of genes to build the photosynthetic machinery that plants need to harness sunlight for growth. And yet, researchers don’t know exactly how these genes work. Now a team led by Princeton University researchers has constructed a public “library” to help researchers to find out what each gene does. Using the library, the team identified 303 genes associated with photosynthesis including 21 newly discovered genes with high potential to provide new insights into this life-sustaining biological process. The study was published online this week in Nature Genetics. “The part of the plant responsible for photosynthesis is like a complex machine made up of many parts, and we want to understand what Read More ›

Researchers studied the thale cress (an Arabadopsis relative) which can have either a single or a double genome. Genome doubling is not good news: “It’s almost always a bad thing to have too much DNA, but we think that sometimes it makes for a ‘hopeful monster’ that just might flourish.” They seem to have found one: “These tough little plants can become little genetic adaptation machines which allows them to invade hostile environments and even thrive where others can’t. In fact, a large proportion of the most invasive plant species in the world are genome doubled, so we hypothesised that there are adaptations that occur as a result of genome duplication that we can focus on and find the genes Read More ›