#Pest uses plant hairs for protection: Trichomes save insect from beetle predationeveryone needs to eat.
To cope with this vicious reality a tiny insect that eats plants has learned to employ the plant's hairs for physical protection from its beetle predator.
and the pest requires a cycad plant for food. The insect's recent invasion to the island of Guam has endangered the island's endemic cycad species. Local biologists introduced a voracious beetle predator to the island to eat the scale insects
but the plant damage by the pest has persisted. We began looking into the reasons that the beetle was failing to control the pest
and discovered that the pest could crawl between the plant's trichomes to reach its feeding sites said UOG Professor Thomas Marler.
what biologists call the hairs that can be found on many plant leaves and stems.
Unfortunately the much larger beetle predator could not make the same journey through the trichomes to feed on the scale insects that were feeding on the plant beneath the trichomes.
Plant hairs serve several functions and one of those functions is to protect the plant from insects.
The glitch in this situation was that the insect that was excluded by the plant hairs was our beneficial insect that eats the scale pest
and the insect that could just walk straight through the hairs was the very pest we wished to control said Marler.
Insects that eat plants have adopted numerous strategies to avoid getting eaten. One of those strategies is to co-opt one of the tactics that plants effectively use to avoid getting eaten.
For example plants produce a plethora of chemicals that taste bad or serve as a poison to herbivores.
These chemicals are effective in deterring the feeding of most general insect herbivores. A well-studied practice by some specialist insects is their predilection to consume these plant poisons sequester those poisons into parts of their body then exploit the poisons for their own protection.
Here we find another example of how an herbivore insect can be confronted with a plant's behavior that helps reduce the likelihood of being eaten then take advantage of that behavior by using it for the same purpose said Marler.
This particular plant-pest-predator relationship has drawn the attention of biologists in the Western Pacific Tropical Research center at the University of Guam
because this pest is threatening cycad populations in other countries. Lessons learned on Guam may benefit cycad conservationists in those other countries.
Marler's research appears in the November issue of the journal Plant Signaling and Behavior.
and accumulate throughout the plants whereas the element cerium did not dissolve into plant tissue. The results contribute to the controversial debate on plant toxicity of nanoparticles
and whether engineered nanoparticles can enter into the food chain. The study was published on 6 february 2013 in the journal ACS Nano.
and Chair of the Department of chemistry at the University of Texas at El paso. The scientists focused on soya bean plants (glycine max) the fifth largest crop in global agricultural production and the second in the U s. The soil in
which the plants were grown was mixed with zinc oxide (Zno) and cerium dioxide (Ceo2 nanoceria) nanoparticles which are among the most highly used in industry.
After the soya bean plants had been grown to maturity in greenhouses the distribution of zinc and cerium throughout the plants was studied.
The use of microscopic synchrotron X-ray beams at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and at the ESRF enabled scientists to determine the chemical form of these metals
and whether they formed part of a nanoparticle in the plant or not. says Hiram Castillo a scientist at the ESRF in Grenoble.
but had reached also the plant pods. A detailed spectral analysis of the X-ray signals showed that the cerium in the nodules
and pods in concentrations higher than in a control group of plants. The spectral analysis did not show the presence of zinc in the plants bound as Zno nanoparticles which means that the zinc in the nanoparticles had been biotransformed.
The spectra suggest that organic acids present in the plants such as citrate are the probable ligands for the zinc.
As zinc is present in most plants it didn't come as a surprise that zinc from the nanoparticles in the soil can enter into the plant tissue.
But plants can also assimilate more dangerous elements like cadmium or arsenic which when used in nanoparticles might pose a real threat. says Hiram Castillo.
Our results have shown also that Ceo2 nanoparticles can be taken up by food crops when present in the soil.
and the next soya bean plant generation. adds Jorge Gardea-Torresdey. One must keep in mind that once engineered nanoparticles enter the food chain this is an accumulative process.
but also how they are biotransformed in the plants. concludes Jorge Gardea-Torresdey. Arturo A. Keller of the University of California in Santa barbara and Co-Director of the UC Center for the Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology who was involved not in this research comments:
#Plant scientists demonstrate new means of boosting maize yieldsa team of plant geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has demonstrated successfully
what it describes as a simple hypothesis for making significant increases in yields for the maize plant.
Plant growth and development depend on structures called meristems--reservoirs in plants that consist of the plant version of stem cells.
When prompted by genetic signals cells in the meristem develop into the plant's organs--leaves and flowers for instance.
Jackson's team has taken an interest in how quantitative variation in the pathways that regulate plant stem cells contribute to a plant's growth and yield.
and in so doing get a maize plant to produce ears with more rows and more kernels.
elite modern varieties of the plant can produce as many as 20. A next step in the research is crossbreed to the weak FEA2 gene variant
if it will produce a higher-yield plant. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
#Some plants are altruistic, too, new study suggestswe've all heard examples of animal altruism:
Now a study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests some plants are altruistic too.
Diggle said it is fairly clear from previous research that plants can preferentially withhold nutrients from inferior offspring
Our study is the first to specifically test the idea of cooperation among siblings in plants.
In corn reproduction male flowers at the top of the plants distribute pollen grains two at a time through individual tubes to tiny cobs on the stalks covered by strands known as silks in a process known as double fertilization.
The team took advantage of an extremely rare phenomenon in plants called hetero-fertilization in
The manipulation of corn plant genes that has been going on for millennia--resulting in the production of multicolored Indian corn cobs of various colors like red purple blue
#Genetically modified tobacco plants produce antibodies to treat rabiessmoking tobacco might be bad for your health
but a genetically altered version of the plant might provide a relatively inexpensive cure for the deadly rabies virus.
Producing an inexpensive antibody in transgenic plants opens the prospect of adequate rabies prevention for low-income families in developing countries.
Then the antibody was produced using transgenic tobacco plants as an inexpensive production platform. The antibody was purified from the plant leaves
and characterized with regards to its protein and sugar composition. The antibody was shown also to be active in neutralizing a broad panel of rabies viruses
and waterways and over-harvesting of plant and animal species. The study was led by Dr. Leandro Castello a research associate at the Woods Hole Research center (WHRC) in collaboration with scientists from various institutions in the United states and Brazil.
The research combines sediment core studies of the waxy molecules from plant leaves with pollen analysis yielding data of unprecedented scope and detail on what types of vegetation dominated the landscape surrounding the African
The classification of C4 versus C3 refers to the manner of photosynthesis each type of plant utilizes.
and antelopes) grazed as well as how plants across the landscape reacted to periods of global and regional environmental change.
but that they weren't a significant source of any other plant nutrients. Results from this work have been published in Agronomy Journal.
In this way it was possible to find out how larvae live in small cumuli of water retained in different parts of the plant
and their plant development environment adds the researcher. According to the author the discovery of this insect-plant relationship is especially important for establishing conservation methods both for these species and others that share the same development environment.
According to the entomologist hoverflies are present in practically all terrestrial ecosystems and they carry out very important biological functions such as pollination nutrient recycling
It's still unclear why the habitats would create such a perfect storm for the virus. The researchers speculate that mosquitoes are drawn to orchards for plant nectar during flowering
The methane-producing bacteria in the cow's gut thrive on these plants. The more roughage is in the diet of the ruminant animal the more methane is produced by the microbes in the gut of the ruminant
which four biomass feedstocks representing the general classes of plants well-suited to serving as fuel crops were mixed
The evidence principally analyzed by former Brown visiting graduate student Qiang He of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China comes from 206 studies of 727 shifts of plant interactions amid varying degrees or gradients
what kinds of plants were involved what kinds of conditions they were under or where they were.
Our results show that plant interactions generally change with increased environmental stress and always in the direction of an outright shift to facilitation (typical for survival responses) or a reduction in competition (typical from growth responses) the authors wrote in the paper published online.
despite the obvious differences among these plant types they all shifted toward less negative or more positive interactions.
These results help us understand the nutritional reasons why insects perform better or worse on different species of plants.
and forestry to improve the resistance of plants to insect pests he said. In the short term though this is basic research that is driven by the curiosity of ecologists to understand nature better.
which plants would experience water stress and therefore drought conditions. The threshold was determined for each study site
which plants were deemed stressed thus allowing a smaller deficit to be considered a drought condition. They also increased the number of days over
Now a study by ORNL scientists with the Department of energy's Bioenergy Science Center has provided the most comprehensive look to date at poplar's proteome the suite of proteins produced by a plant's cells.
The ability to comprehensively measure genes and proteins helps us understand the range of molecular machinery that a plant uses to do its life functions said ORNL's Robert Hettich.
Obtaining and analyzing information about plant proteomes is especially tricky considering a plant such as poplar can potentially manufacture more than 40000 different proteins.
Unlike an organism's genome which is the same for every cell and remains constant the proteome varies from cell to cell
and changes over time as the plant adapts to different environmental conditions. The analytical techniques we've demonstrated allow us to measure the range of proteins very deeply
Knowing how plants change and adapt to environmental surroundings by altering their proteins could help bioenergy researchers develop poplar trees better suited to biofuel production.
and function of a plant cell Abraham said. If we can identify the proteins that create a favorable trait such as fast growth then we can incorporate that protein
or modify it to develop a superior plant with all favorable traits through transgenics. The study's coauthors are ORNL's Robert Hettich Paul Abraham Richard Giannone Rachel Adams Udaya Kalluri and Gerald Tuskan.
and replicated the unique structural elements that create the bright iridescent blue color of a tropical plant's fruit.
The plant of course cannot change color. By combining its structure with an elastic material however we've created an artificial version that passes through a full rainbow of colors as it's stretched.
The fruit of the South american tropical plant Margaritaria nobilis commonly called bastard hogberry is an intriguing example of this adaptation.
Without it soft banks erode out from under the other plants and the water line retreats farther and farther back into the marsh.
which leads to more efficient photosynthesis. Plants photosynthesize using one of two methods: C3 a less efficient ancient method found in most plants including wheat and rice;
and C4 a more efficient adaptation employed by grasses maize sorghum and sugarcane that is better suited to drought intense sunlight heat and low nitrogen.
so we can engineer it into C3 crops said Thomas Slewinski lead author of a paper that appeared online in November in the journal Plant and Cell Physiology.
Slewinski is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of senior author Robert Turgeon professor of plant biology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The promise of transferring C4 mechanisms into C3 plants has been pursued fervently and funded on a global scale for decades he added.
If C4 photosynthesis is transferred successfully to C3 plants through genetic engineering farmers could grow wheat and rice in hotter dryer environments with less fertilizer while possibly increasing yields by half the researchers said.
C4 plants have evolved independently from C3 plants some 60 times at different times and places.
By looking closely at plant evolution and anatomy Slewinski recognized that the bundle sheath cells in leaves of C4 plants were similar to endodermal cells that surrounded vascular tissue in roots and stems.
Slewinski suspected that if C4 leaves shared endodermal genes with roots and stems the genetics that controlled those cell types may also be shared.
When the researchers grew those plants they first identified problems in the roots then checked for abnormalities in the bundle sheath.
In all plants an enzyme called Rubisco facilitates a reaction that captures carbon dioxide from the air the first step in producing sucrose the energy-rich product of photosynthesis that powers the plant.
But in C3 plants Rubisco also facilitates a competing reaction with oxygen creating a byproduct that has to be degraded at a cost of about 30-40 percent overall efficiency.
In C4 plants carbon dioxide fixation takes place in two stages. The first step occurs in the mesophyll
This eliminates the problem of the competing oxygen reaction making the plant far more efficient. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U s. Department of agriculture.
How salt stops plant growthuntil now it has not been clear how salt a scourge to agriculture halts the growth of the plant-root system.
They discovered that an inner layer of tissue in the branching roots that anchor the plant is sensitive to salt
The study published in the current issue of The Plant Cell is a boon for understanding the stress response and for developing salt-resistant crops.
An important missing piece of the puzzle to understanding how plants cope with stressful environments is knowing
The scientists grew seedlings of a laboratory plant (Arabidopsis) that is a relative of mustard using a custom imaging system
While plants can't run for safety they can control how much they grow into dangerous territory commented Dinneny.
It turns out that Abscisic acid a stress hormone produced in the plant when it is exposed to drought
or salty environments is important in controlling the plant equivalent of fight or flight. To understand how Abscisic acid controls growth the investigators devised a strategy to inhibit the response to this hormone in different tissue layers of the root.
The live imaging allowed them to watch what happened to root growth in these mutant plants.
in addition to acting as a filter for substances in the soil the endodermis also acts as a guard with Abscisic acid to prevent a plant from growing in dangerous environments said Dinneny.
And as sea levels rise with climate change understanding how plants particularly crops react to salt might allow us to develop plant varieties that can grow in the saltier soils that will likely occur in coastal zones.
which they cultured in their lab using seeds of the garden-variety rice plant Oryza sativa.
Wusirika thinks the rice callus culture may be attacking cancer with the same sort of plant chemicals that make vegetables so healthy to eat.
Madidi National park contains 11 percent of the world's birds more than 200 species of mammals 300 types of fish and 12000 plant varieties.
and plants--so the monkeys are forced actually to spend more time seeking out the right foliage to eat such as new shoots
and buried these acorns that finally contributed to generate new plants. The fact that the larva was resulted still inside definitive for the near future of the acorn and therefore the future of oak forests.
The knowledge of multiple existing interactions among animals and plants are essential to know what should be protected
Research featured in the January 2013 issue of Science Findings--a monthly publication of the station--reveals a complex range of forest plant responses to a warming climate.
Although the overall potential for growth increases as the climate warms we found that plant species differ in their ability to adapt to these changing conditions said Tara Barrett a research forester with the station who led the study.
which attempt to straighten the plant upwards. These high-energy sugars are fermented into biofuels when the trees are harvested in a process that currently needs to be more efficient before it can rival the production of fossil fuels.
and looked for any genetic differences between these plants and those allowed to grow naturally straight upwards.
About Willow Treestraditionally grown for wicker furniture and baskets and an ancient medicinal plant whose chemical contents were the precursors to Aspirin willows are seen now as important crops for energy and the environment.
Climate analyses for the period from 1995 to 2005 show a steady decline in water availability for plants in the region.
#Global plant diversity still hinges on local battles against invasives, study suggestsin Missouri forests dense thickets of invasive honeysuckle decrease the light available to other plants hog the attention of pollinators
and offer nutrient-stingy berries to migrating birds. They even release toxins to make it less likely native plants will germinate near them.
Why then are recent popular science articles recommending a recalibration of the traditional no-tolerance attitude toward nonnative species suggesting that we've been unfair to invasives
Most scientific studies of the effects of invasive plants are done at a single scale. Some studies scrutinize biodiversity in meter-square quadrats
The problem the scientists say in the January 18 issue of Science is that the effect of invasive plants on species richness depends on scale.
invasive plants cause a large loss in species richness at small scales but this effect diminishes at larger scales.
Invasives reduce the sheer number of individual plants in a plot and if there are fewer plants you'll find fewer species she says.
The invaded sites can catch up with uninvaded ones Knight adds because the number of species does not increase indefinitely.
Invasive plants have negative impacts on plant communities at smaller scales--the scales that are crucial for necessary ecosystem services like water management and nutrient cycling.
Invasive plant species are reducing the abundance of native plant species but most species are still present
Using electricity generated by coal-fired plants to power the cars defeats the purpose to some extent but
a) the traditional method of converting corn or other plants to ethanol; b) converting energy crops into electricity for BEVS rather than producing ethanol;
blooming up to a month earlierusing the meticulous phenological records of two iconic American naturalists Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold scientists have demonstrated that native plants in the eastern
Compared to the timing of spring flowering in Thoreau's day native plants such as serviceberry
Nearly a thousand miles away in Wisconsin where Leopold gathered his records of blooming plants like wild geranium
In 2012 the warmest spring on record for Wisconsin plants bloomed on average nearly a month earlier than they did just 67 years earlier
The work thus has important implications for predicting plant responses to changing climate essential for plants such as fruit trees which are highly susceptible to the vagaries of climate and weather.
We used relationships revealed in historical records to predict how 47 species of native plants would respond to unprecedented spring temperatures
Flowering of native plants a harbinger of spring in the world's temperate regions signals the start of the growing season.
and insects that depend on the plants. Earlier blooming exposes plants to a greater risk of experiencing cold snaps that can damage blossoms
and prevent fruiting says Temple. The Door County (Wisconsin) cherry crop was ruined in 2012 because the trees bloomed very early in response to record-breaking warmth only to be hit by subsequent frost.
In the current issue of Nature a team of researchers led by Michigan State university shows that marginal lands represent a huge untapped resource to grow mixed species cellulosic biomass plants grown specifically for fuel production
and other nonwoody plants that grow naturally on unmanaged lands are sufficiently productive to make ethanol production worthwhile Conservative numbers were used in the study
and production efficiency could be increased by carefully selecting the mix of plant species Robertson added.
#Amino acid studies may aid battle against citrus greening diseaseamino acids in orange juice might reveal secrets to the successful attack strategy of the plant pathogen that causes citrus greening disease also known as Huanglongbing or HLB.
Furthermore constructed wetlands should be furnished with plants which according to previous studies of the Institute of Environmental sciences in Landau are capable of reducing pesticide exposure up to 70 per cent.
Greater diversity of flora means more speciesyet another interesting result of the study is that the number of arthropods can be determined based on the number of plants living in the forest.
This finding lends support to earlier theories that postulate that the richness of species increases in correlation with the diversity of plant life.
The researchers discovered that for every species of plant found there would be 20 species of arthropod.
Prairie and miscanthus levels were lower due to harvest of the plant biomass (and nitrogen) each winter with no fertilizer nitrogen additions to replace it as occurred in corn
#Giant tobacco plants that stay young forevertobacco plants bloom when they are just a few months old
which can keep the plants young for years and which permits unbounded growth. In short an ideal source of biomass.
The life of tobacco plants is short. They grow for around three to four months followed by flowering and then die.
Their size is limited also with plants only growing to about one-and-a-half to two meters tall.
Now researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular biology and Applied Ecology IME in MÃ nster have located the tobacco plant's very own fountain of youth
which can prevent the plants from change blooming to flowering. This also averts the plants'early change demise to senescence
--and suppresses the factor that halts growth. The first of our tobacco plants is now almost eight years old
but it still just keeps on growing and growing says Professor Dirk Prã fer head of the Department of Functional and Applied Genomics at the IME.
and drop off the IME plant's leaves stay healthy and green. This is why the scientists have christened their modified plant species forever young.
But what exactly do researchers do to give the plants eternal youth and make them capable of unbounded growth?
--so that the plant's flowering is delayed explains Prã fer. Researchers then insert the modified gene back into the plant using a bacterium.
The role of the bacterium is to act as a sort of shuttle service for the modified gene.
and could be used on other kinds of plants; at the moment the scientists are working also on potato plants on behalf of a Japanese chemical company.
They use their knowledge to get crops to yield a far greater amount of biomass.
and plant-based raw materials the yield per hectare will have to double by 2050 claims the German Bioeconomy Council.
However our method is only likely to deliver success as long as the flowers of the plant in question play no significant role--sugar beet for instance.
Preventing plants from flowering presents a significant advantage in that no flowering means no production of seeds or pollen.
As a result plants have no way of reproducing which means they cannot spread into the environment in an unplanned way.
and be able to disable plants'growth limits using chemical mutagenesis as well--that is to say using normal growing techniques.
The advantage is that a plant grown in this way would no longer be modified genetically but simply a plant grown using standard techniques.
But in order to be able to do that we first need to gain a better understanding of the deregulation of genes says Prã fer who hopes cultivation experiments might begin next year.
Then perhaps normal plants will be in a position to grow tall too. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.
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