Two-thirds of the energy in the food we eat comes from seeds – including wheat, rice, maize, oilseeds – and their associated storage structures as fruits. Without seeds, the direct product of sexual reproduction. providing packaged, high-energy, nutrient-rich, transportable and storable structures, life as we know it would be impossible. This week, many researchers from [...]

There’s been a couple of posts on Research Blogging that have caught my eye in the past couple of days. Both of them are interesting because they show how important studying interaction is to understand the natural world. Lab Rat comments on a paper on Trees that farm bacteria. She also points out the connections [...]

In the Mascarenes, a young oceanic archipelago, the Dombeyoideae have extensively diversified and have evolved specific breeding systems compared to the continental species. By constructing a molecular phylogeny, Le Péchon et al. (pp. 343–357) show that the diversity of the Mascarene’s Dombeyoideae is the result of four independent colonizations from Madagascar and that dioecy is [...]