No, this has nothing to do with whales (they’re fish-like denizens of the deep, and has probably already been done by some countries under the guise of ‘scientific whaling’ anyway…). Nor is it a strange and unusual instruction to implant microchips into the natives of that principality within the Untied Kingdom. It’s not even a [...]
Review of International Chromosome Conference
Variation in mating systems is common across angiosperm taxa, leading to a trade-off between inbreeding avoidance and reproductive assurance. Tedder et al. examine European populations of the alpine perennial, Arabis alpina, which is currently being developed as a model system for studying the ecological genetics of arctic–alpine environments, and show that mating system variation ranges from [...]
Erysimum capitatum (Brassicaceae) is a widespread and variable plant species with generalized pollination that is attacked by a number of herbivores. Lay et al. find that individuals of E. capitatum are visited by diverse groups of pollinators and herbivores that shift in abundance and importance in time and space. Developmental mechanisms that allow plants to [...]
Elegant research should always be applauded (or publicised, which is what I’m doing here!). And they don’t come more elegant than David Greene and Mauricio Quesada’s seminal study entitled ‘The differential effect of updrafts, downdrafts and horizontal winds on the seed abscission of Tragopogon dubius’ (Functional Ecology 25: 468–472, 2010). Acknowledging that many plant species [...]
Pollen–pistil interactions are an essential prelude to fertilization in angiosperms, and self-incompatibility (SI) is the best understood of these at a molecular level. Allen et al. review studies in the Asteraceae, and consider that recent cellular and molecular work in Senecio squalidus (Oxford ragwort) have challenged the belief that sporophytic SI and pollen–pistil interactions in [...]
A key factor of pollen-tube attraction to an ovule is that it is species-specific, and recently a family of secreted proteins with attractant properties has been discovered in Torenia fournieri. Kanaoka et al. study TcCRP1, an orthologous gene of TfCRP1 from T. concolor, and find it is expressed predominantly in the synergid cell. The gene product [...]