Category: Amazing Plants
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Secret Glue Ivy Uses To Climb Could Save Our Lives
More than 130 years ago, Charles Darwin discovered that ivy’s sticking power is thanks to a thin yellow glue secreted from its roots. But since then, little has been known about how the adhesive works. (Click on title for full story.)
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Microbiome Frontier: Bacteria Aid Tree Branches Collect Nitrogen From Air
It’s well documented that nitrogen fixation happens in bacteria-rich nodules on the roots of legumes such as soybeans, clovers, alfalfa and lupines. Bacteria help the roots fix atmospheric nitrogen gas into a form which can be used by the plant. There is a strongly held belief that only plants with root nodules can benefit from this type of symbiosis. This research provides the first direct evidence that nitrogen fixation can occur in the branches of trees, with no root nodule required. (Click on title for full story.)
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Plants That Sting And Bite May Have Something To Teach Us
Additional research projects are directed towards investigating which other plants may use structural calcium phosphate to face challenges in their natural environment and which biomechanical advantages this material conveys to the plants. The discovery is also of potential relevance for bionic applications. “Surgical bone substitutes have to be highly tissue compatible, cellulose-composite are likely to meet that criterion” (Click on title for full story.)
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What Do Trees Do While You Are Sleeping? They Sleep too
The leaves and branches were shown to droop gradually, with the lowest position reached a couple of hours before sunrise. In the morning, the trees returned to their original position within a few hours. It is not yet clear whether they were “woken up” by the sun or by their own internal rhythm. (Click on title for full story.)
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Going On The Offense: Venus Flytraps’ Evolutionary Table-Turning
Since the dawn of invertebrates, plants have had to defend themselves against hordes of nibblers. On at least a half-dozen occasions, however, plants turned the tables and became predators: the sundew with its sticky tentacles, pitcher plants with their beckoning pools of enzymes, and the flytrap with its swift clamp of death. These plants’ aggressive feeding habits help them survive in poor soil by giving them a new source of nitrogen and other nutrients. Many biologists suspect this predatory behavior evolved when ancestors of today’s carnivorous plants turned mechanisms that normally detect and defend against insect pests into offensive weapons. (Click on title for full story.)
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Mystery Algae Breaks The Rules And Rewrites History
And Leliaert says that he’s wary of calling the seaweed “multicellular” because its cells are undifferentiated and suspended in a stiff gel. Still, he says, the whole plant has a distinct structure that includes a root-like holdfast, a stem, and blades. How the cells of the plant communicate with one another remains unknown. (Click on title for full story.)
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How Does A Fungus Evade A Plant’s Defenses? Trickery!
Like other pathogenic microorganisms such as bacteria, fungus manipulates its host not to be attacked by their immune system. To do this, invading microorganisms have developed a special type of molecules called effectors that attach directly on the body attacked, making it believe that is part of its plant. In an experimental work in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), the researchers found that the plant does not recognize the fungus as foreign, employing similar effector RALF whose genetic sequence shares with the plant genetics (Click on title for full story.)
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Plants That Collect Sand Are Less Likely To Get Eaten
Sand entrapment on plant surfaces, termed psammophory or sand armor, is a phylogenetically and geographically widespread trait. The functional significance of this phenomenon has been poorly investigated. Sand and soil are nonnutritive and difficult for herbivores to process, as well as visually identical to the background. We experimentally investigated whether this sand coating physically protected the plant from herbivores or increased crypsis (e.g., decreased apparency to herbivores). (Click on title for full story.)
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A Redwood Is A Community, Not Only A Tree
All told, the survey found that redwoods contain more diversity — 282 epiphytes in and directly beneath the trees — than other tree species that researchers had previously sampled, including the Douglas fir and the Sitka spruce. This study also uncovered a species new to science — a lichen as diminutive as its redwood host is towering. (Click on title for full story.)
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Plants Can Make Bad Mycorrhizal Partners Behave
“The plant exploits the competitive situation of the two fungi in a targeted manner, triggering what is essentially a market-based process determined by cost and performance”. (Click on title for full story.)