Several ecologically important plant families in Mediterranean biomes have seeds with morphophysiological dormancy. Hidayati et al. study four species of the intractably dormant Australian genus Hibbertia (Dilleniaceae) and find that although they are congeneric, sympatric and produce seeds of identical morphology, they show a remarkable level of variation in dormancy-break and germination requirements. The results have [...]

In biology, matters are rarely either good or bad; oftentimes they may be both at once (albeit usually for different organisms). Take for instance hydrogen cyanide, which is widely regarded to be rather bad since it is a potent poison that can kill most living things by ‘interfering’ (that’s a euphemism!) with respiration. However, it [...]

The January 2011 Annals of Botany is out and I had hoped to put together a press release for one of the papers. Seeds of alpine plants are short lived: implications for long-term conservation by Mondoni et al is one of those papers that states the obvious, but does so in a way that makes [...]

Functionality of marcescent corollas Persistence of withered corollas after anthesis (‘corolla marcescence’) is widespread in angiosperms, yet its functional significance does not seem to have been explored. Herrera examines seed production in two southern Spanish insect-pollinated plants, Viola cazorlensis and Lavandula latifolia, and shows that removal of the corollas increases mean number of seeds per [...]

Osmotic and salinity effects on germination Seeds in saline environments face a dilemma between allocating reserves to either osmotic balance or growth and development.  Zhang et al. show that barley seeds incubated in saline solutions germinate more rapidly than seeds in iso-osmotic PEG solutions. This suggests that barley seeds use salt as a metabolically cheap [...]

Hormones and sugar network signalling in seeds Endospermic legumes are abundant in tropical forests and their establishment is closely related to the mobilization of storage polysaccharides and proteins. Tonini et al. adopt a systems approach to evaluate the effects of abscisic acid (ABA), ethylene and sugars on mobilization in Sesbania virgata during the period of [...]

The cold desert annual grass Eremopyrum distans exhibits position-dependent effects of seeds in the spikelet. Wang et al. (pp. 95–105) find that seeds from three positions in a spikelet differ in morphology, mass and in percentage and rate of seed germination, and the plants derived from them differ in growth and seed production. Distal seeds [...]