botany – Quanta Magazine

Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun

Meghan Willcoxon — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 13:50:35 +0000

Each summer, like clockwork, millions of beech trees throughout Europe sync up, tuning their reproductive physiology to one another. Within a matter of days, the trees produce all the seeds they’ll make for the year, then release their fruit onto the forest floor to create a new generation and feed the surrounding ecosystem. It’s a reproductive spectacle known as masting that’s common to many tree...

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Why Are Plants Green? To Reduce the Noise in Photosynthesis.

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 14:40:13 +0000

From large trees in the Amazon jungle to houseplants to seaweed in the ocean, green is the color that reigns over the plant kingdom. Why green, and not blue or magenta or gray? The simple answer is that although plants absorb almost all the photons in the red and blue regions of the light spectrum, they absorb only about 90% of the green photons. If they absorbed more, they would look black to our...

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Soil’s Microbial Market Shows the Ruthless Side of Forests

Gabriel Popkin — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 15:00:48 +0000

Beneath the green vegetable world we see is a dark microbial world we don’t. The crops we eat, the forests that sustain us and most other life forms, even the regulation of Earth’s climate — all benefit from a shadowy network of fungi and bacteria that mobilize soil nutrients and trade them with plants for sugars and fats. And yet the workings of this subterranean society are almost unknown to...

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Unexpected ‘Germline’ Plant Cells May Shield New Generations

Charlie Wood — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 15:00:46 +0000

Karel Říha’s mutant plants were too healthy. The molecular biologist, a postdoctoral researcher in Texas in the year 2000, was breeding botany’s leading model organism, Arabidopsis, an unremarkable weed in the mustard family. He had carefully chosen a strain with a mutation that robbed the plants of their ability to repair the caps at the end of their DNA. With every cell division...

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DNA Analysis Reveals a Genus of Plants Hiding in Plain Sight

Olena Shmahalo — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 16:30:16 +0000

For centuries, biologists have used taxonomy to sort living things into groups based on appearance, behavior and other perceptions of identity. They have christened plants and animals with binomials rooted in Latin and Greek that often allude to their distinctive macroscopic features. Beyond their usefulness in identification, those categorizations and name choices reflect prevailing theories...

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