The best botanical blogging from September has been curated at A Blog Around The Clock.

First ever comprehensive study of plants, from giant rainforests to common snowdrops, finds 22% of all species at risk, reports The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/29/plant-species-face-extinction

There has been a major problem with the flowering of the almond crop in Australia this year.  Normally flowering is strong and yields are good but this year the bloom of the principal variety, Nonpareil, across the entire almond industry has been very patchy and very light, the lightest we have seen for a very [...]

Silencing of tandem transgenes in potato Transgene expression stability is a critical point in applications of transgenic plants. Nocarova et al. study long-term changes in transgene expression in potato, Solanum tuberosum. Silencing of two introduced reporter genes (GFP and NPTII) is successive in all registered cases (in about 25 % lines), indicating an interconnection between [...]

Image: Gerhard Schuster, Wikimedia Commons. In a beautifully understated opening sentence – worthy of Watson and Crick’s famous 1953 seminal paper describing the structure of DNA – Robin Ohmi et al. (Nature Biotechnology, doi:10.1038/nbt.1643) remind us that ‘much remains to be learned about the biology of mushroom-forming fungi, which are an important source of food, [...]