Vascular plant

Dicot (3)
Flower (780)
Flowering plant (219)
Monocot (6)
Vascular plant (515)

Synopsis: Plants: Vascular plants: Vascular plant:

For example, needle-leaved Canadian evergreens make the most of scant sunlight and their leaf litter feeds the acidic soils that nurture networks of microorganisms, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria,

#Flowering plants May be Considerably Older Than Previously Thought A new analysis of the land plant family tree suggests that flowering plants may have lived much earlier than previously thought.

Flowering plants may be considerably older than previously thought, says a new analysis of the plant family tree.

Previous studies suggest that flowering plants, or angiosperms, first arose 140 to 190 million years ago.

Now, a paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pushes back the age of angiosperms to 215 million years ago,

some 25 to 75 million years earlier than either the fossil record or previous molecular studies suggest. oeif you just looked at the fossil record,

you would say that angiosperms originated in the early Cretaceous or late Jurassic, said Michael Donoghue of Yale university. oemost molecular divergence times have shown that they might be older than that,

If confirmed, the study could bolster the idea that early angiosperms promoted the rise of certain insects.

and pollen. oethe fossil record suggests that a lot of these insect groups originated before angiosperms appeared,

This study shifts the oldest angiosperms back farther in time towards the origin of groups like bees and flies,

To trace the origins of flowering plants, the researchers used genetic comparisons of living plants and clues from fossils to reconstruct the relationships among more than 150 terrestrial plant species

. Though their results contradict previous age estimates for angiosperms, they support estimates for other plant groups. oemany of the dates that we get correspond really well to the known fossil record,

at least for the origin of land plants and the origin of vascular plants and seed plants, said Donoghue. oebut we got a much older date for the origin of angiosperms one thats really out of whack with the fossil record, Smith added.

is that the first flowering plants werent diverse or abundant enough to leave their mark in the fossil record. oewe would expect there to be a time lag between the time of origin

Maybe angiosperms were in that fuse state, said Donoghue. oebut its hard to imagine flowering plants would have had a big impact on the origin of major insect groups

if that were the case, he added. Another possibility, the researchers allow, is that the molecular methods may be amiss. oeif the angiosperms originated 215 million years ago,

then why dont we find them in the fossil record for almost 80 million years?

mammals and vascular plants all reach maximum diversity in Yasunã. The study is published in the open-access scientific journal PLOS ONE. oewe have documented so far 596 bird species occurring in Yasuni,

and prevent new seedlings from establishing. In this way, younger seedlings, which would be more suitable to warmer conditions,

cannot easily progress beyond the sapling state. A question closely related to environmental changes is, whether humans should help the populations to adapt?

be sure to thin the seedlings to one per cluster. Thinnings can be added to salads or sandwiches.

Wheat seedlings remember that they ve gone through winter before they start to flower and make seeds.

When First Dinosaur Was born Newfound fossils hint that flowering plants arose 100 million years earlier than scientists previously thought suggesting flowers may have existed

Flowering plants are now the dominant form of plant life on land evolving from relatives of seed-producing plants that do not flower such as conifers and cycads.

Flowering plants were the last group of plants appearing in Earth's history said Peter Hochuli a paleobotanist at the University of ZÃ rich's Paleontological Institute

Flowering plants or angiosperms became the dominant plants about 90 million years ago when the dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

Now scientists have unearthed ancient pollen grains with microscopic features typically seen in flowering plants. These well-preserved fossils discovered in two core samples drilled in northern Switzerland are about 245 million years old dating back to the earliest known dinosaur in the middle Triassic period.

See Images of the Earliest Known Dinosaur Our findings suggest that the origin of flowering plants is rooted much deeper than originally thought Hochuli told Livescience.

Six different types of pollen were found in the ancient samples revealing that flowering plants back then may have been considerably diverse.

and the region that is now Switzerland was much drier than the Barents sea region suggesting the flowering plants spanned a broad range of environments.

The fossil record of flowering plants is continuous dating back 140 million years. Until now the fossil record of flowering plants suggested they dominated the planet rather quickly after their earliest appearance.

This sudden appearance has bothered scientists ever since Darwin who called the origin of flowering plants an'abominable mystery'Hochuli said.

These newfound fossils reveal that flowering plants may have existed more than 100 million years longer than previously thought.

This increased span of time might help explain how flowering plants spread diversified and prevailed on land.

The ancestors of flowering plants currently remain a mystery and scientists aren't sure what kind of events or conditions might have spurred their origin.

So far no direct ancestors of flowering plants are known Hochuli said. Some groups of plants are suspected to be related closely.

But the evidence is weak and most of these groups are thought to be specialized too to be at the base of the flowering plants.

Hochuli and his colleague Susanne Feist-Burkhardt detailed their findings Oct 1 in the journal Frontiers in Plant science.

when burned and the seedlings thrive in freshly burned ash-rich soils. Give a hillside a really good torching

-and nut-bearing trees and wind-dispersed seedlings take root instead according to a study published today (March 19) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The seedling communities of the forest floors are really different in a hunted forest compared to a well-protected forest said study co-author Ola Olsson an ecologist

at Lund University in Sweden. In the long run that's going to make the hunted forest look quite different from

Whereas similar large trees dominated both types of forest the seedlings looked very different. Well-protected forests had many seedlings such as the bush mango that rely on primates to spread their seeds.

Many of these trees bear fruits or nuts that humans also eat. Hunted forests held seedling species that relied on wind to disperse their seeds.

In a generation that could fundamentally change the forest ecology he said. And whereas gorilla and monkey meat does provide protein for local people the fruit trees the primates maintain may be an even bigger economic benefit to people Olsson said.

Flowering plants and edible crops dominate the landscape in the later part of this era as humans cultivate the land h

Cretaceous period plants One of the hallmarks of the Cretaceous period was the development and radiation of the flowering plants.

The oldest angiosperm fossil that has been found to date is Archaefructus liaoningensis found by Ge Sun and David Dilcher in China.

and wasps evolved at about the same time as the angiosperms. It was cited frequently as an example of co-evolution.

It is thought now that competition for insect attention probably facilitated the relatively rapid success and diversification of the flowering plants.

In Wyoming the understory plant cover which includes new tree seedlings shrubs and flowers more than doubled Ewers found.

Much of a moose's energy is maintained by eating flowering plants and fresh shoots from trees such as willow and birch.

thus leaving room for sequoia seedlings to sprout and grow. Black burn scars that hollow out the living giants attest to their resistance to flames.

but from 2009 through 2011 fire departments across the United states responded to an average of 200 blazes yearly that started with the evergreen.

The first gymnosperm genome the common Christmas tree (i e. Norwegian wood) has been sequenced. The coniferous Norway spruce (Picea abies) is one of the most widespread and important plants in Europe.

The gymnosperms belong to a group of seed-producing plants that includes conifers cycads Ginkoplants and woody plants called gnetophytes.

The emergence of flowering plants several million years earlier probably allowed mega-herbivores such as the imposing Triceratops to evolve from smaller herbivores that were about the size of a house cat Loewen said.

And yet despite continued success and the basic facts that given good soil sunlight and water a good seed will sprout he is still in awe every spring when his seedlings first pop up in his planters.

Well for the same reasons my friend is always in awe of his seedlings so much can go wrong.

It's also like those seedlings a small miracle. This article was adapted from Farming Fishing and Small Miracles in Mozambique for the WWF blog Science Driven.

Bees buzz at just the right frequency to release pollen from tomatoes and other flowering plants.

Gagliano and her colleagues recently showed corn seedling's roots lean toward a 220-Hertz purr

Chili seedlings quicken their growth when a nasty sweet fennel plant is nearby sealed off from the chilies in a box that only transmits sound not scent another study from the group revealed.

If you stake down a seedling you do it a little bit of disservice because a tree needs to perceive motion.

People selected new cultivars everywhere but that was a secondary diversification later. From biblical times the olive tree has served as a symbol of sacredness peace and unity.

The same deer return every year to their favorite clumps of the bushy evergreens called deeryards.

Evergreens also can be troublemakers. Cedar juniper cypress and sequoia trees have all been known to cause allergies

A thick golden liquid produced by industrious bees honey is made using the nectar of flowering plants

or fresh evergreens for decoration borrow a few small cut branches and try this experiment. You could also try using cut flowers such as carnations.

So when elk hang around in the canyons all year it s harder for young saplings of these deciduous trees to grow large enough to then produce their own seedlings.

For instance seedlings will take a while to grow and become established Flessa said. The response of bird populations may also not be evident for a few years.

Populations of hemlock wooly adelgids which kill evergreens by feeding on the plants'needles year-round are expected to plummet.

and closely related trees are slow-growing evergreens that live for hundreds of years and can grow to 150 feet tall.

And far from living in a monotonous grassland the mega-beasts inhabited a colorful Arctic landscape filled with flowering plants and diverse vegetation the study researchers found.

Arabidopsis a small flowering plant that is closely genetically related to C. canephora has only one gene for linoleic acid.

The mossy plants that depended on spores for reproduction were being replaced by the first seed-bearing plants the gymnosperms.

Gymnosperms are vascular plants able to transport water internally. Gymnosperms have exposed seeds that develop on the scales of cones

and are fertilized when pollen sifts down and lands directly on the seed. Today s conifers are gymnosperms as are the short palm like cycads and the gingko.

Arthropods continued to diversify during the Permian period to fill the niches opened up by the more variable climate.

Myers group included crop scientists around the world who were conducting FACE experiments on 41 different genetic strains or cultivars#of grains and legumes over three continents.

When the team analyzed their data the results showed a significant decrease in the concentrations of zinc and iron as well as protein in wheat and rice cultivars.

and more evergreens the researchers report today (July 7) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

#Fossils of Ancient Australasian Trees Found in Patagonia In Patagonia at the southern end of South america scientists have discovered 52.2-million-year-old fossils of a giant evergreen tree that now is only found thousands

In higher latitudes gymnosperms survived and conifer forests began to recover from the Permian Extinction.

In the Cretaceous period between 120 million and 65 million years ago researchers now think wildfires helped trigger the development of the first flowering plants.

and insects along with some very primitive mammals and some of the earliest flowering plants he said.

The harsh conditions after the impact favored fast-growing flowering plants nudging forests toward a new pecking order a new study reports.

When you look at forests around the world today you don't see many forests dominated by evergreen flowering plants lead study author Benjamin Blonder said in a statement.

Dinosaurs stomped through forests ruled by evergreen angiosperms which never drop leaves. Angiosperms are flowering plants grasses

and trees excluding conifers like spruce and pine. The dinosaur-era angiosperms included ancient relatives of holly rhododendrons and sandalwood.

Other plants in the ancient forests included beeches cycads gingkoes ferns and palm trees. See Photos of a Fossilized Forest in the Canadian Arctic Fossil records show that angiosperms of all kinds thrived before a meteorite

or asteroid crashed into Earth 66 million years ago. That stupendous blast charred vast woodlands that had grown from Canada to New mexico.

In North america about 60 percent of plant species went extinct according to earlier studies After the blaze deciduous angiosperms

which drop their leaves seasonally bounced back much better than the evergreens. Blonder an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson wanted to know why the deciduous angiosperms outcompeted their evergreen cousins during the cold dark years after the impact (called an impact winter.

The researchers pored through thousands of prehistoric leaves from Wyoming's Hell Creek Formation. The fossilized leaves spanned the impact from the last 1. 4 million years of the Cretaceous period through the first 800000 years of the Tertiary period.

so plant breeders at universities and small seed companies usually cannot use patented seed to breed the new crop varieties that should be sustainable alternatives to the conventional cultivars of the big commercial firms.

It appears that that she dyed her hair possibly with henna (a flowering plant. We are still not completely sure if and

The trees also have been suffering from white pine blister rust a disease accidentally introduced via imported seedlings nearly a century ago

and then thin out the seedlings to a given distance. Have your child plant identical seeds in two different pots.

or thin the seedlings when they come up. In the second pot plant several seeds very close together

or allow the seedlings to grow without thinning. Keep the pots in a warm sunny location and keep the soil moist.

The flood was timed for the spring seed release from these trees to provide moist ground for seedlings.

By the end of the Devonian progymnosperms such as Archaeopteris were the first successful trees. Archaeopteris could grow up to 98 feet (30 meters) tall with a trunk diameter of more than 3 feet.

#New Clues to Evolution of Flowering Forests Flowering plants are the most successful group of plants On earth.

The first fossils of flowering plants or angiosperms resembled the brush that grows along fast-flowing streams and rivers.

Trees That Dominate the Rain forest Researchers already knew that angiosperms had diversified and spread before the dino-killing meteorite smashed into Earth and reset life on the planet 65 million years ago.

or if angiosperms were already on their way to world domination before the impact. In the new study scientists sought clues by comparing modern forests to fossil plants.

The modern leaves were compared to fossil angiosperms from as far back as 132 million years ago.

The results suggest angiosperm forests resembling today's tropical forests dominated after the meteorite impact not before.

and their seedlings may suffer during long dry summers. The Sierra nevada mountains are the only place in the world where sequoias are found.

Withstanding drought A drought could also be hard for seedlings and young trees which don't have developed well root systems that can tap water supplies.

But giant sequoia seedlings seem to have an effective drought response they completely shut down tiny pores in their leaves called stomata.

The Theobroma cacao is an evergreen that is native to tropical regions of the American continent and its seeds or beans are the source of the 4m metric tonnes of chocolate produced each year and much of it from countries like the Ivory coast and Indonesia.

Researchers have shown also corn seedlings lean toward sounds with a 220-Hertz frequency the same tune emitted by the plants'roots

and chili seedlings grow quicker when they sense a fennel plant is growing nearby. Moving#but slowly Groot does more than just sense

or the number of new seedling trees. The mortality rates, which are of the order of 1,

But when they extended their search to seedlings and saplings the number rose to 90%.

William Laurance, a conservation biologist at STRI, notes that the presence of seedlings doesn't necessarily translate into stable long-term populations.

when the majority of fertilizer was applied later to seedlings, when growth is fastest. Each year, Chinese farmers apply around 600 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare,

The hybrid offspring of crosses between two different cultivars of a crop plant often tend to produce higher yields.

Unfortunately, of the more than 400 flowering plants known to reproduce by apomixis which include dandelions and blackberries few are crops.

For now, the technology available limits such projects to seedlings and young trees on relatively small plots of land.

Measurements on 1, 500 of the 10,000 seedlings his team has planted suggests that a rise of 2-4 °C causes seedlings to put out shoots

Once these new cultivars are made, however, they still need to be tested both in the paddy and on the plate.

And jatropha seedlings are often not well-suited to the climate in which they are planted.

What has happened is after taking 15 years to incorporate this resistance in a cultivar it would take Phytophthora infestans only a couple of years to defeat it.

And transpiration in deciduous trees is greater than that in evergreens, which means that they release more moisture as water vapour,

and then treat the transgenic seedlings with antibiotics, which kills those plants that haven't taken up the foreign genes.

It finds that gymnosperms or seed-bearing plants including conifers and cycads, are the most at-risk group of plants,

The evolution of vascular plants completely changed history, allowing a high concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere to be sustained.

and that it was not until the rise of vascular plants those with a circulatory system to transport nutrients in the Devonian that oxygen levels rose to near-modern values.

The rise of vascular plants led to the oxygenation of the atmosphere, because their photosynthesis pumped out oxygen while large amounts of organic matter,

and a lead researcher on the project, explains that the group started out using traditional tools to sequence the genomes of the domesticated tomato cultivar Heinz 1706 (the one used to make the famous ketchup) and its closest wild relative, Solanum pimpinellifolium.

But the Brazilian Association of Seeds and Seedlings, a trade body, says that 70%of soya-bean farmers now buy their Roundup Ready seeds legally.

The team behind the identification of the fossils point out that flowering plants went through a period of major diversification just

They also carefully caught bees as they were pollinating the flowering plant Delphinium barbeyi (a type of larkspur) and anaesthetised them

In 2009, for instance, she found transgenic sugar-beet seedlings in a bag of soil sold to gardeners."

separating individual seedlings to minimize pest spread, applying low levels of pesticides and implementing biological control with natural enemies means that"there haven t been major outbreaks since 2009,

Shrub genome reveals secrets of flower powera shrub with cream-coloured flowers that is the closest living descendant of Earth s first flowering plants has had its genome decoded.

Amborella s gives a glimpse at changes that helped flowering plants, or angiosperms, to diversify from a common ancestor with gymnosperms another major plant lineage,

which includes conifer trees such as spruces. Comparisons of the genomes of Amborella and those of other plants suggest that an early ancestor of flowering plants gained a duplicate copy of its genome

a feature known as polyploidy. Many angiosperms are known to be polyploid potatoes, for instance, have between two and six copies of each chromosome.

But the duplication in Amborella predates all the other polyploids, says depamphilis, who led a team in 2011 that inferred this ancient duplication from more limited genetic data4.

and expansion of flowering plants by providing an extra copy of each gene for evolution to play around with to yield new functions,

The origin of flowers the defining features of angiosperms might be explained by a collection of genes that appeared

when angiosperms split from gymnosperms, analysis of the Amborella genome reveals. About one-quarter of the genes involved in flowering lack obvious counterparts in the genomes of gymnosperms,

whereas the other three-quarters existed in the common ancestor of both plant lineages. His team s analysis also provides insight into the evolution of complex seeds, floral scents and other features of flowering plants.

Keith Adams, a plant molecular geneticist at the University of British columbia in Vancouver, Canada, thinks the idea that a genome duplication helped flowering plants to diversify is"an intriguing hypothesis

although it s impossible to prove. Botanists studying other plants should find the Amborella genome useful as a reference point to identify

and a region of Australia, has a particularly devastating effect on the popular Cavendish cultivar,

A strain of Foc previously wiped out the Gros Michel cultivar, which was exported the main banana variety from the nineteenth century until the 1950s.

But exports of the cultivar account for only about 13%of the 150 Â million or so tonnes of bananas and cooking bananas (plantains) produced annually.

Industrial farms growing a single Cavendish cultivar are at a high risk of Foc-TR4 infestation,

Hundreds of cultivars are farmed, and this biodiversity is an important rampart against disease. Researchers do not yet have a full picture of the susceptibility of these varieties,

but many cultivars are likely to be resistant to Foc-TR4 because they are biologically different to the Cavendish.

fewer fir seedlings can grow large enough to escape into the canopy above the reach of moose

which grows the evergreen seedlings tree planters put in the ground for reforestation. Our growth medium is mostly peat moss with some ground and sterilized styrofoam (recycled from the old

or damaged styro blocks the seedlings are grown in) and coconut husk. The coco is the magic ingredient.

With flowering plants now contaminated with pollen from plants w/re-engineered DNA like rapeseed & corn & soy its become a case of malnutrition at the lowest level of the food chain.

and lots of flowering plants that men do not eat will be lost when the bees go too. In fact many of the plants where you would expect to see bees in the past will be history

One with giant evergreens. Look at the tops of the trees the old ones. They are dead.

When evergreens get old the heartwood dies and that includes the top. Every tree you see that looks like this is producing preposterous amounts of Methane but very little Oxygen.

and seedlings of the parent plants that companies crossbreed to create the seeds they sell to farmers.

or dwarf cultivars that can be packed tightly together. It would make the most sense to plant fast-cycle salad crops first says Jean Hunter a professor at Cornell who studies food-processing and waste-management systems for long-term living away

The Big Mike cultivar soon began succumbing to a variant of Fusarium now known as Race 1. By 1960 the breed was functionally extinct.

When the moose population expands unchecked by predation fewer fir seedlings can grow large enough to escape into the canopy above the reach of moose

i e. the main fruit crop in North africa and the Middle east are amongst the groups of flowering plants characterized by difficulties in species discrimination based on their look.

The trial field'Mierenbos'in Wageningen used for growing the resistant Elm cultivars is infested completely with M. mali with all the trees showing severe galling symptoms.

In a study to appear in the December 22 issue of the journal Nature the team constructed an evolutionary tree of more than 32000 species of flowering plants--the largest time-scaled evolutionary tree to date.

Fossil evidence and reconstructions of past climatic conditions suggest that early flowering plants lived in warm tropical environments explained co-author Jeremy Beaulieu at the National Institute for Mathematical & Biological Synthesis (NIMBIOS) at the University

and stem data onto their evolutionary tree for flowering plants they found that many plants were equipped well for icy climates even before cold conditions hit.

the origin of flowering plants including all major food crop species. On 20 december 2013 a paper by the Amborella Genome Sequencing Project that includes a full description of the analyses performed by the project as well as implications for flowering plant research will be published in the journal Science.

Amborella (Amborella trichopoda) is unique as the sole survivor of an ancient evolutionary lineage that traces back to the last common ancestor of all flowering plants.

and the University of California-Riverside--is uncovering evidence for the evolutionary processes that paved the way for the amazing diversity of the more than 300000 flowering plant species we enjoy today.

This unique heritage gives Amborella a special role in the study of flowering plants. In the same way that the genome sequence of the platypus--a survivor of an ancient lineage--can help us study the evolution of all mammals the genome sequence of Amborella can help us learn about the evolution of all flowers said Victor Albert of the University

Scientists who sequenced the Amborella genome say that it provides conclusive evidence that the ancestor of all flowering plants including Amborella evolved following a genome doubling event that occurred about 200 million years ago.

therefore offer an explanation to Darwin's abominable mystery--the apparently abrupt proliferation of new species of flowering plants in fossil records dating to the Cretaceous period said Claude depamphilis of Penn State university.

Comparative analyses of the Amborella genome are already providing scientists with a new perspective on the genetic origins of important traits in all flowering plants--including all major food crop species. Because of Amborella's pivotal phylogenetic position

it is an evolutionary reference genome that allows us to better understand genome changes in those flowering plants that evolved later including genome evolution of our many crop plants--hence it will be essential for crop improvement stressed Doug Soltis of the University of Florida.

As another example of the value of the Amborella genome Joshua Der at Penn State noted We estimate that at least 14000 protein-coding genes existed in the last common ancestor of all flowering plants.

Many of these genes are unique to flowering plants and many are known to be important for producing the flower as well as other structures and other processes specific to flowering plants.

This work provides the first global insight as to how flowering plants are genetically different from all other plants On earth Brad Barbazuk of the University of Florida said

and it provides new clues as to how seed plants are genetically different from non-seed plants. Jim Leebens-Mack from UGA noted that The Amborella genome sequence facilitated reconstruction of the ancestral gene order in the'core eudicots'a huge group that comprises about 75 percent of all angiosperms.

This group includes tomato apple and legumes as well as timber trees such as oak and poplar. As an evolutionary outsider to this diverse group the Amborella genome allowed the researchers to estimate the linear order of genes in an ancestral eudicot genome

and to infer lineage-specific changes that occurred over 120 million years of evolution in the core eudicot.

since it split from the rest of the flowering plant tree of life. For example DNA sequences that can change locations

In addition to its utility in retrospective studies of the evolution of flowering plants the Amborella genome sequence offers insights into the history and conservation of Amborella populations.

There are only 18 known populations of this very special angiosperm in mountainous regions New caledonia. Resequencing of individual Amborella plants across the species'range reveals geographic structure with conservation implications plus evidence of a recent major genetic bottleneck noted Pam Soltis of the University of Florida.

< Back - Next >

Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011