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20 news posts in Plants

Sustainability

12 Sep 2016

Don’t fear GM crops, they could help solve the sustainability crisis

by Emily Barker, Frontiersin.org Modified crops are nothing to be scared of and could be essential in solving the global sustainability crisis, explained Dr. James Lloyd, Deputy Field Chief Editor for Plant Biotechnology in the open-access journal Frontiers in Planet Science. Much of southern Africa is currently suffering consecutive seasons of drought, and farmers in Eastern Kenya have lost more than 80% of their crops due to lack of rain. These droughts, caused by climate change, could potentially leave 36m people across Africa facing hunger. However, there is hope in drought resistant crops. Over a five-year period, a total of 2.9 million farmers in 13 African countries saw their yields increase by 20% to 30% after sowing a variety of drought-tolerant hybrids. “I think that using this type of technology has huge potential to increase crop yields and I would be optimistic that we can increase food production as we need to in the next years or so,” he added. Making modified starch more ecofriendly Dr. Lloyd and his team, who are based in South Africa, have currently been working on increasing the amount of phosphate that’s bound to starch by manipulating plant genes. Modified starch is used by the paper […]

Life sciences

05 Aug 2016

Butterflies use differences in leaf shape to distinguish between plants

The preference of Heliconius butterflies for certain leaf shapes is innate, but can be reversed through learning, says a study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. These results support a decades-old theory for explaining the evolution of the exceptional diversity of leaf shapes in passionflowers. The tropical butterfly Heliconius eratodistinguishes between shapes, and uses them as a cue for choosing the plants on which to feed and lay eggs, shows new research by scientists from the University of Cambridge and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The butterfly has an innate preference for passionflowers with particular leaf shapes, but can learn to overcome this preference in favor of other shapes, especially those that are the most abundant in the local flora. These preferences can promote the evolution of plant biodiversity. Heliconius erato, the red passionflower butterfly, is a large (5 to 8 cm wingspan), white-red-black butterfly that occurs throughout Central America and tropical South America. Females lay their eggs on passionflowers (Passiflora), a genus of tropical vines with extreme variation in leaf shape, both between and within species. For example, related species can have triangular, elongated, elliptic, lobed, or spear-shaped leaves, while even on the same plant leaf shape may vary […]

Life sciences

01 Aug 2016

Do trees go to sleep at night?

by Juan Jovel, Frontiersin.org It may sound like something from a fantasy book, but scientists have found that trees seem to go to sleep at night. One hour after sunset, tree branches start dangling and continue doing so throughout the night, reaching their lowest point about 9-11 hours after sunset, new research published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science has found. When morning comes they start to return to their normal position, which takes another three hours. The daily position of the branches and leaves allows trees to maximize their capture of sunlight, which fuels their biomass-producing processes, while the drooping position probably reduces the loss of heat during the night. Circadian rhythms refer to biological processes that cycle roughly every 24 hours and explain, for instance, patterns of sleeping and feeding in animals. The scientists from Finland, Austria and Hungary, setup to investigate whether silver birch trees experience movement patterns in a circadian fashion. They used a sophisticated technique called Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS), which allows monitoring the movement of objects, including trees or parts thereof, during day or nighttime. Dr. Eetu Puttonen, from the National Land Survey of Finland, and his international collaborators, used TLS to monitor the […]