AoBBlog is delighted to welcome two guest authors who are carrying out project work with Annals of Botany Editor Dr Karine Alix. Aurélien and Antoine introduce themselves below, and will be making posts in both English and French over the next months. While most words can be translated between the languages, I am always interested [...]

DNA testing is an important part of our life now – as we have seen with proving that a skeleton in Leicester comes from the body of the last Plantagenet King Richard III, and not a mediaeval Monk, or with the implications of finding horse meat in a lot of beef products. I’ve just done an [...]

Since every newspaper in the UK is featuring pages of pictures of the snow, I thought I would add some from the Botanic Gardens of the University of Leicester. After unseasonably warm, spring-like weather, the bulbs were growing and birds singing last week. Now an unusual 15cm/6″ of snow has fallen in 24 hours, and [...]

Our videoblog discusses plants in the family Proteaceae, a well-known Southern hemisphere family with many beautiful and well-known representatives in Africa and Australia. The striking red flowers of the genus Leucospermum, from South Africa feature on the cover of the Annals of Botany for this year. Banksia is a well-known Australian genus, the bottle brush [...]

I’m writing an AoBBlog post (or maybe posts) on ten plants that all botanists should know quite a lot about. Criteria for inclusion include importance in the environment, importance to people as food or culturally, scientific interest, global nature, and evolutionary position. What are your suggestions?

Gentamicin is an unusual antiobiotic with two properties that make it particularly useful in plant cell culture: it is autoclavable so is added to media before autoclaving/sterilization, and it is active against mycoplasmas as well as gram positive and gram negative bacteria. Over the last week, I too have been getting it. I discovered this [...]

We bought a television two years ago. Sadly, despite the 723 channels available, my worst suspicions about quality have been confirmed: there is almost nothing I want to watch, especially now that I have seen everything there is from Attenborough, ”How it’s made” and ”Mythbusters”. If only programmes like Taylor Lockwood’s “In search of the holey veil” [...]