A rose by any other name would smell
like celery?
North Carolina State University research intended to extend the “vase life” of roses inserts a gene from celery inside rose plants to help fight off botrytis, or petal blight, one of the r…
Cultivating coca bushes, the source of cocaine, is speeding up destruction of rainforests in Colombia and threatening the region’s “hotspots” of plant and animal diversity, scientists are reporting in a new study. The findings, which they say unders…
Catnip, the plant that attracts domestic cats like an irresistible force, has proven 99 percent effective in repelling the blood-sucking flies that attack horses and cows, causing $2 billion in annual loses to the cattle industry. That’s the word fr…
Like espionage agents probing an enemy’s fortifications, scientists are snooping out the innermost secrets of the amazing defense mechanisms that plants use to protect themselves from diseases. The effort — intended to discover ways of bolstering…
Invasive plant species are a serious environmental, economic and social problem worldwide. Their abundance can lead to lost native biodiversity and ecosystem functions, such as nutrient cycling.
Despite substantial research, however, little is…
Scientists have discovered why orchids are one of the most successful groups of flowering plants – it is all down to their relationships with the bees that pollinate them and the fungi that nourish them. The study, published tomorrow in the Americ…
Even by invading plants’ standards, the filaree, or common stork’s bill, has been remarkably successful. Introduced into North America in the eighteenth century, it is now endemic in south-western states such as California, and the plant’s intriguin…
Stanford, CA — Plant biologists have discovered the last major element of the series of chemical signals that one class of plant hormones, called brassinosteroids, send from a protein on the surface of a plant cell to the cell’s nucleus. Although …
COLUMBIA, Mo. — In an article in the Nov. 23 issue of the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, researchers with Dow AgroSciences and the University of Missouri report on two bacterial enzymes that, when transformed into corn…
Do mountain tops act as sky islands for species that live at high elevations? Are plant populations on these mountain tops isolated from one another because the valleys between them act as barriers, or can pollinators act as bridges allowing gen…
An Anglo-Swiss research project has found that the impact of disease-resistant genetically-modified wheat plants on insects may be negligible.
Many studies have looked at the effects of genetically-modified (GM) plants on single non-target insects…
Collaborative research at the University of Guam has people asking: “What IS a species” and entomologists wondering about the relationship between an insect species and the host plant or plants it feeds on.
Western Pacific Tropical Research …