By modifying the gene expressions responsible for the branch growth during the first year of woody species researchers of the Centre for Plant Biotechnology
and plants and their interactions says Brandon Barton a UW-Madison postdoctoral researcher. My students and I were standing out in a cornfield one day as big gusts of wind came by
and twice as many soybean aphids on the plants growing in the open. Wind has no direct effect on the aphids tiny insects that hug the plants
and anchor themselves while feeding with a needle-like mouthpart called a stylet. The aphids appear on the plants
whether it's windy or not and we showed that in lab experiments Barton says.
and windless movement with a machine that tugged on tethered plants to shake and bend them--a stilled soybean plant represented a smorgasbord for the lady beetle.
If the plant is moving it takes four times as long for the predator to start eating
#Seeding plant diversity for future generationsoxford researchers have constructed a'hit list'of the plant species most needed to boost the overall diversity of the Millennium Seed Bank
The research team constructed a new evolutionary tree of a major family of wild plant species taking the distance between species as a proxy for plant trait diversity.
This enabled the researchers to see how to capture overall plant diversity in the most efficient way.
They calculate that by adding just 10 more carefully chosen species the overall diversity of plant species in the seed bank would be boosted by 10%.
It is a big family--containing more than 19000 plants including all the peas and beans peanuts clover and lupins--to see how it was represented in the seed bank.
And just like people plant species tend to be most like their closest relatives and to live quite near them too.
'We don't know which plants and which plant traits will be most valuable in the future. Diversity gives us options.
#For legume plants, a new route from shoot to roota new study shows that legume plants regulate their symbiotic relationship with soil bacteria by using cytokinins--signaling molecules--that are transmitted through the plant structure from leaves
and maintain these nodules hurting the ability of the plant to grow so legumes also have means to reduce their number
Interestingly it has been known for some time that the regulation of these nodules is done in the shoots of the plants above ground
and that somehow the leaves transmit the information to the roots using an unknown chemical mechanism to signal that the plant should develop
Cytokinins are known important plant hormones to regulate many aspects of plant growth and development and now a new function--root nodule regulation--has been added to their repertoire.
The plants perform the regulation in a complex way. The plants grow the nodules providing a place for the rhizobia to prosper.
Then rhizobial infection of the roots triggers the production of certain peptides in the roots
This study together with previous research results clearly shows that cytokinins are key signaling molecules in organ-to-organ communication allowing balanced plant growth
However no convincing results were obtained from studies using Arabidopsis the best known model plant. Now our study with Lotus japonicus has given us the first convincing evidence of a shoot-to-root signal function of cytokinin.
When plants have green leaves they're doing photosynthesis and taking carbon out of the atmosphere Medvigy said.
and when animals begin feeding (either on plants or animals that eat plants) and reproducing said Schwartz who is familiar with the research
In the western United states particularly water availability is affected by plants which are like little water pumps that drain soil moisture throughout the entire growing season he said.
and do not account well for how plants respond to regional fall conditions he said.
what we're trying to do in terms of improving the way that we model plants. A lot of models that we use in terms of global change are fairly simplistic.
The plant and animal species that will be affected most are those living in habitats which depend on special phases and structures of forest development.
Growers need to be concerned as about the amount of potassium available to their plants as they are about nitrogen he said.
But growers outside the U s. should also focus on developing an integrated management program that considers factors such as optimum planting dates plant densities and pest management.
But despite the higher nitrogen content of U s. soils corn plants in the U s. were not more efficient at absorbing nitrogen fertilizers from the soil than those in other regions.
Nitrogen recovery efficiency the measure of how much applied nitrogen the above-ground portion of a plant absorbs from the soil was the same--48 percent--for the U s. and other parts of the world.
despite plants being grown at much higher densities. On a per-plant basis corn plants are not taking up more nutrients than they were said in the past Ciampitti.
They may be taking up less because they are grown closer together but they are more efficient at producing more grain with the same amount of nutrient uptake.
But what happened to the plants on which the dinosaurs fed? A new study led by researchers from the University of Arizona reveals that the impact that spelled doom for the dinosaurs also decimated the evergreen flowering plants to a much greater extent than their deciduous peers.
Applying biomechanical formulae to a treasure trove of thousands of fossilized leaves of angiosperms--flowering plants excluding conifers--the team was able to reconstruct the ecology of a diverse plant community thriving during a 2. 2 million-year period
spanning the cataclysmic impact event believed to have wiped out more than half of plant species living at the time.
Blonder and his colleagues studied a total of about 1000 fossilized plant leaves collected from a location in southern North dakota embedded in rock layers known as the Hell Creek Formation
The collection consists of more than 10000 identified plant fossils and is housed primarily at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Our study provides evidence of a dramatic shift from slow-growing plants to fast-growing species he said.
which a plant acquires resources predicts how it can respond to a major disturbance. And potentially this also tells us why we find that modern forests are generally deciduous and not evergreen.
That would have favored plants that grew quickly and could take advantage of changing conditions such as deciduous plants.
whether the leaf was a chunky expensive one to make for the plant or whether it was a more flimsy cheap one Blonder explained.
In other words how much carbon the plant had invested in the leaf. In addition the researchers measured the density of the leaves'vein networks a measure of the amount of water a plant can transpire and the rate at
which it can acquire carbon. There is a spectrum between fast-and slow-growing species said Blonder.
while slow-growing evergreens dominated the plant assemblages before the extinction event fast-growing flowering species had taken their places afterward.
or plant growing regulators to protect their crops against pests and diseases. But used in a wrong way pesticides can pose a risk to humans and the surrounding environment.
This study demonstrates for the first time that host plants from different plant families and with different ecological strategies possess very different microbial communities on their leaves said lead author Steven W. Kembel a former postdoctoral researcher in the UO's Institute of Ecology
In the world of microbiology plant leaves are considered to be a habitat known as the phyllosphere.
and negative--on the health and functioning of their host plants he said. For example while some bacteria on leaves cause disease others may protect the plant against pathogens or produce hormones that increase plant growth rates.
In the animal microbiome the researchers noted studies comparing large numbers of species have shown that host diet--for example herbivory
and Green said provides a comparable understanding of the host attributes that explain patterns of microbial diversity in the plant microbiome.
and plants the researchers used a rapid e-publishing tool that facilitates immediate name registration
In line with this plant sources of fat have been suggested to be a better choice compared with animal sources.
on leaves and other plant characteristics. Many bacteria were associated with certain functional traits such as leaf thickness wood density or leaf nitrogen content characteristics that directly impact tree growth survival and reproduction.
Our laboratory has ongoing research with the USDA Animal Plant Health Inspection Service into remote-reporting Internet-based technologies
Environmental stressors such as heat and drought can trigger early aging of plants which slows growth
and JIP60-like play a major role in the protective actions triggered by a key plant defense hormone called jasmonate or JA.
Like a watchful sentry JA takes action at the first sign of plant distress producing proteins that prepare the plant to combat excess heat lack of water or attack by disease organisms.
since the 1990s that JA played a role in plant resistance but von Wettstein and Rustgi are the first to document how it actually takes place.
The genes lie in close proximity to these other plant traits providing a unique target for future crop breeding programs.
It actually affected the long-term grain yield by causing injury to the plants. In India and Pakistan he said that very hot temperatures--up to about 135 degrees Fahrenheit--cause heat injury to wheat barley and rice.
#Most famous wheat gene discovered, clears way for non-GMO breedingwashington State university researchers have found the most famous wheat gene a reproductive traffic cop of sorts that can be used to transfer valuable genes from other plants
But with the rise of agriculture and cultivated wheat 10000 years ago the plant's genetic structure changed.
and sometimes five chromosomes would go to one cell and one to the other resulting in a sterile plant.
or sent to municipal water-treatment plants not equipped to handle the chemicals involved. All bad ideas according to the authors of the new survey who work at Duke university MIT Ohio State university Newcastle University Los alamos National Laboratory the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration and Stanford.
Study finds important genes in defense responsewhen corn plants come under attack from a pathogen they sometimes respond by killing their own cells near the site of the attack committing cell suicide to thwart further damage from the attacker.
This cell sacrifice can cause very small often microscopic spots or lesions on the plant.
But up until now it's been difficult to understand how the plant regulates this spotty defense mechanism
The findings which appear in PLOS Genetics could help researchers build better defense responses in corn and other plants;
HR is thought to occur in all higher-order plants including all trees and crop plants and is normally a tightly regulated response.
This mutation causes a corn plant to inappropriately trigger this hypersensitive defense response causing spots on the corn plant as well as stunted growth.
and learn more about it in other plants. USDA plant geneticist and breeder Jim Holland co-authored the paper
along with first authors Bode Olukolu and Guan Feng Wang who are postdoctoral researchers at NC State.
when the recommended amount by the European Organization for the Protection of Plants to not affect the crop yield is of just 40 cysts;
Plant parasitic nematodes are microorganisms that feed on the nutrients absorbed by the roots of plants;
or ten tubers an infected plant generates only four or five and of a smaller size than usual.
and other plants in tropical landscapes and then in dispersing their seeds. Having just sparrows in an ecosystem is like investing only in technology stocks:
Providing refuges of conventional plants has been especially effective for suppressing resistance in the pink bollworm an invasive pest of cotton.
and flowers of plant species such as water-plantain eyebright lousewort bitter root and European yellow-rattle which are weeds commonly present across Europe and Asia.
'To our surprise it looks like this moth chose new host plant in Iran. This moth was reported in 2009 from the northern regions of the country
'Many factors can possibly influence host plant choice including food quality and quantity climatic conditions synchronization physiological conditions in both insect and food plant genetic modifications etc.
and change in different environmental conditions so an insect can change its choice of food plant on the basis of seeking the most beneficial complex of factors.
They represent unique opportunities for biodiversity researchers to explore the interactions between different plant species. UFZ researchers use rainforest models like FORMIND and FORMIX3 for this purpose.
A team from the University of Birmingham and partners in China have identified 871 wild plant species native to China that have the potential to adapt
and millet. 42%of these wild plant species known as crop wild relatives (CWR) occur nowhere else in the world.
The flora of China comprises more than 20000 native higher plant species a proportion of which have value as gene donors for crop improvement.
The research carried out by academics from the University of Birmingham represents a significant contribution to global research in plant genetic resources for food and agriculture particularly in the fight against the detrimental impacts of climate change on food security.
Shelagh Kell Research Fellow School of Biosciences said China has remarkable wild plant diversity. With more plant species than Europe and CWR of globally important food crops its position as a provider of plant genetic resources for crop improvement is crucial to us all globally.
Now that we have identified China's priority CWR and some of the hotspots in which they occur stakeholders need to implement a strategy to secure their future.
and for accessing plant material for crop improvement is incredibly complex. However urgent attention needs to be paid to China's CWR to ensure that they are conserved adequately
These wild species can be used by plant breeders to create stronger more resilient crop varieties
But in the early 1970s parthenium entered Ethiopia in shipments of food aid from the United states. With no serious contenders the plant flourished.
In the past three decades parthenium has become the second most common weed in Ethiopia suppressing the growth of all other plants
The plant is an aggressive invader. A single plant can produce 25000 seeds and completes its life cycle in six to eight weeks said Wondi Mersie a Virginia State university professor and principal investigator of the Virginia Tech-led project.
It displaces native species affects human health and negatively impacts quality of life. Parthenium is poisonous. People who come into contact with it can suffer from skin irritations bronchial asthma and fever.
what varieties to plant and how they will be harvested. You have to work out the numbers for you Stein told the field day attendees.
Archeologists have a good understanding of domestication--conscious breeding for traits preferred by people-of annual plants such as grains (rice wheat etc.
The plants were a bit shorter but nothing died and it all came back the next year. A recent analysis showed a net yearly farm profit of $60000
Next the scientists looked at how coffee's genetic make-up is distinct from other species. Compared to several other plant species including the grape
Upon taking a closer look the researchers found that coffee's caffeine enzymes are more closely related to other genes within the coffee plant than to caffeine enzymes in tea and chocolate.
By looking at which families of genes expanded in the plant and the relationship between the genome structure of coffee and other species we were able to learn about coffee's independent pathway in evolution including--excitingly--the story of caffeine.
Scientists theorize that the chemical may help plants repel insects or stunt competitors'growth. One recent paper showed that pollinators--like humans--may develop caffeine habits.
Insects that visited caffeine-producing plants often returned to get another taste. The new Science study doesn't offer new ideas about the evolutionary role of caffeine
Previous research suggested that plant climbing might be a way for salamanders to access additional prey items like aphids
What was surprising was that the salamanders collected on trees did not have anything one would associate with a plant-feeding insect like aphids.
These are findings of a new study that looked at the agricultural effects in 2005 of high concentrations of ground-level ozone a plant-damaging pollutant formed by emissions from vehicles cooking stoves and other sources.
The main component of smog ozone at ground level can cause leaf damage that stifles plant growth injuring and killing vegetation.
when nitrogen oxides carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds react with sunlight after the chemicals'release from vehicles industry or burning of wood or other plant or animal matter.
Plants start to exhibit damage when they are exposed to ozone levels that reach 40 parts per billion or above according to previous research.
The insect is capable of eating more than 100 different plant species and in 2010 it caused $37 million worth of damage to apples alone.
and biology its chemical ecology and the types of damage it does to various host plants.
when polluted runoff from a rapidly developing watershed overwhelmed the Bay's waters with nutrients causing algae blooms that blocked out much-needed sunlight for underwater plants.
and the submerged plants virtually disappeared for nearly three decades. That is until the early 2000s when the underwater grasses also called submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) rapidly recolonized nearly the entire region.
When you're out on the Flats in summer at low tide you see these plants at the water surface all around you
and the amount of light available for plants to grow underwater. A dry period from 1997-2002 combined with the absence of major storm events provided ideal conditions for new plant growth
and a critical threshold for the amount of light reaching the plants was crossed. As a result the bed began to expand
and colonize deeper water. Exceptional growing conditions during the drought period allowed the system to overcome turbid water
Light availability is the most important factor in the growth of submersed plants. Then the plants took over with a process called positive feedback.
That is once given a chance grass beds can improve their own growing conditions by helping sediment drop to the bottom
These feedbacks also affect a plant bed's resilience or its ability to resist disturbances such as storms
and models used here can be applied elsewhere to explore similar plant bed dynamics around the world.
The paper Unexpected resurgence of a large submersed plant bed in Chesapeake bay: Analysis of time series data by Cassie Gurbisz and Michael Kemp of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental science's Horn Point Laboratory was published in the March 2014 issue of Limnology and Oceanography.
Sorghum exampleit is difficult to distinguish the human impact on the effects of natural factors on the evolution of crop plants.
Three societies the same environmentclimate environment and competition between species are well-known factors in the genetic evolution of plants.
But crop plants are subject to an additional force: human action. Up to now few studies have been able to distinguish the results of the domestication of the effects of natural constraints on crop diversity.
DNA analysis of the 300 plants gathered has identified four genetic groups of sorghum. Two of them correspond to two introduced varieties.
and agronomists this work shows the role of human societies in the geographic distribution and evolution of the genetic diversity of crop plants.
Accelerated plant growth at higher elevations caused by increasing temperatures would trigger more water absorption
Evapotranspiration is the combination of water evaporation from land and the loss of water through plant-leaf transpiration.
which feeds on many plant species but it may also specialize in feeding on greenhouse crops.
and initial signs of evolution of specialized races for these host plants were found in the study.
Despite initial signs of host race formation whiteflies prefer natural species to cultivated crops as host plants which could facilitate pest dispersal into natural vegetation in spring.
Whiteflies are able to use numerous outdoor plants around greenhouses as seasonal habitats in summer.
therefore return from these wild plants to newly planted greenhouse crops in August and September Ovcarenko says.
#Plant life forms in the fossil record: When did the first canopy flowers appear? Most plant fossils are isolated organs making it difficult to reconstruct the type of plant life or its ecosystem structure.
In their study for Geology published online on 28.aug 2014 researchers Camilla Crifã and colleagues used leaf vein density a trait visible on leaf compression fossils to document the occurrence of stratified forests with a canopy dominated by flowering plants.
Furthermore they found that leaves from the forest floor which are the closest analog to fossil floras preserve this pattern.
and as humans globally eat more and more meat conversion from plants to food becomes less and less efficient driving agricultural expansion and land cover conversion
The domestication of animals and plants a prerequisite for the development of agriculture is one of the most important technological revolutions during human history.
The Atlantic Forest (Mata Atlã¢ntica) is one of the most important and threatened biodiversity hotspots in the world containing the only living examples of nearly 10000 species of plant and more bird species than all of Europe.
--and protect its plants birds and other animals--by paying land owners on a large scale to set aside land for conservation.
three species of tropical root knot nematode whose larvae infect the roots of thousands of different plant species;
There is hope if robust plant protection strategies and biosecurity measures are implemented particularly in the developing world where knowledge is scant.
Ancient conversation between plants, fungi and bacteriathe mechanical force that a single fungal cell or bacterial colony exerts on a plant cell may seem vanishingly small
In fact it may not be too much of a stretch to say that plants may have moved never onto land without the ability to respond to the touch of beneficial fungi according to a new study led by Jean-Michel Anã a professor of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
when fairly strong stimuli are applied to the entire growing root says Anã who just published a review of touch in the interaction between plants and microbes in the journal Current Opinion in Plant Biology.
It's known that disease-causing fungi build a structure to break through the plant cell wall
After the fungus announces its arrival the plant builds a tube in which the fungus can grow.
There is clearly a mutual exchange of signals between the plant and the fungus says Anã.
Mycorrhizae are the beneficial fungi that help virtually all land plants absorb the essential nutrients--phosphorus and nitrogen--from the soil.
and plants also communicate with chemicals says Anã. So this is comparable not to breaking the door
Clearly the plant is much more active than we thought; it can process signals prepare the path
Beyond fungi some plants engage in symbiosis with bacteria called rhizobia that fix nitrogen from the atmosphere making it available to the plant.
We propose the purpose is to apply mechanical stimulation so the plant will start building a home for the rhizobium--for mutual benefit.
when the plant gets a chemical signal from the bacterium --but the growing tube inside the root hair that accepts the bacteria requires something else
In many respects this symbiosis parallels the older one between plants and beneficial fungi Anã says.
Plants used the symbiosis toolkit to develop this relationship with mycorrhizae and then used it again for bacteria.
and adjusts the plant's water conservation machinery accordingly. It's similar to a thermostat said Zhen-Ming Pei an associate professor of biology at Duke.
--in addition to improved farming practices and traditional plant breeding--will add to the arsenal of techniques to help crops withstand summer's swelter.
But engineering plants to withstand drought has proven difficult to do largely because plants use so many strategies to deal with dehydration
and hundreds of genes are involved. The problem is confounded by the fact that drought is accompanied often by heat waves
and other stresses that require different coping strategies on the part of the plant Pei said.
One way that plants respond to water loss is by boosting the levels of calcium within their cells.
The calcium surge acts as an alarm signal that triggers coping mechanisms to help the plant rebalance its water budget.
But until now the molecular machinery that plants use to send this signal --and monitor water availability in general--remained unknown.
Pei and Duke colleagues Fang Yuan James Siedow and others identified a gene that encodes a protein in the cell membranes of plant leaves
The gene was identified in Arabidopsis thaliana a small unassuming plant related to cabbage and canola that is the lab rat of plant research.
Plants with defective versions of the calcium channel don't send an alarm signal under water stress like normal plants do.
When the researchers grew normal plants and plants with defective versions of the gene side by side in the same pot and exposed them to drought stress the mutant plants experienced more wilting.
The findings could lead to new ways to help plants thrive when water is scarce.
The team's next step is to manipulate the activity of the OSCA1 gene and related genes and see how those plants respond to drought--information that could lead to crops that respond more quickly and efficiently to dehydration.
Plants that enter drought-fighting mode quickly and then switch back to normal growth mode quickly when drought stress is gone should be able to allocate energy more efficiently toward growth Pei said.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Duke university. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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