Endangered Plants News

April 23, 2024

Top Headlines

The Spiciness of Mustard May Depend on Soil Microbes

Apr. 22, 2024 — New study finds microbes may influence the taste of mustard ...

Plant Sensors Could Act as an Early Warning System for Farmers

Apr. 17, 2024 — Using a pair of sensors made from carbon nanotubes, researchers discovered signals that help plants respond to stresses such as heat, light, or attack from insects or bacteria. Farmers could use these sensors to monitor threats to their crops, ...

Unique Field Study Shows How Climate Change Affects Fire-Impacted Forests

Apr. 17, 2024 — During the unusually dry year of 2018, Sweden was hit by numerous forest fires. A research team has investigated how climate change affects recently burnt boreal forests and their ability to absorb carbon ...

Making Crops Colorful for Easier Weeding

Apr. 17, 2024 — To make weeding easier, scientists suggest bioengineering crops to be colorful or to have differently shaped leaves so that they can be more easily distinguished from their wild and weedy counterparts. This could involve altering the crops' genomes ...

Latest Headlines

updated 10:53pm EDT

CO2 Worsens Wildfires by Helping Plants Grow

Apr. 16, 2024 — By fueling the growth of plants that become kindling, carbon dioxide is driving an increase in the severity and frequency of wildfires, according to a new ...

Seed Ferns: Plants Experimented With Complex Leaf Vein Networks 201 Million Years Ago

Apr. 16, 2024 — According to a research team led by palaeontologists, the net-like leaf veining typical for today's flowering plants developed much earlier than ...

Twisted Pollen Tubes Induce Infertility

Apr. 16, 2024 — Plants with multiple sets of chromosomes, known as polyploids, are salt-tolerant or drought-resistant and often achieve higher yields. However, newly formed polyploid plants are often sterile or have ...

Biofortified Rice to Combat Deficiencies

Apr. 11, 2024 — Vitamin B1 is an essential micronutrient for human beings. Its deficiency is the cause of numerous diseases of the nervous and cardiovascular systems. Researchers have achieved a significant advance ...

Genetic Underpinnings of Environmental Stress Identified in Model Plant

Apr. 11, 2024 — Researchers have identified 14 genes that thale cress -- a plant commonly used in genetic investigations since its genome is well documented -- express more when responding to five specific ...

How Plants Adjust Their Photosynthesis to Changing Light

Apr. 8, 2024 — Light supplies the energy plants need to build up biomass. A research team is researching how plants adapt their photosynthesis to changing light. They describe a key molecular mechanism that ...

Researchers Discover Key Gene for Toxic Alkaloid in Barley

Mar. 28, 2024 — Barley is one of the most important cereal crops on a global scale. Many barley cultivars produce a toxic alkaloid called gramine that affects the suitability of barley as fodder, but also helps to ...

Melting Glaciers in a Warmer Climate Provide New Ground for Invasive Species

Apr. 1, 2024 — In 2022 and 2023, biologists from research institutes in the UK and the Falkland Islands led two expeditions to South Georgia to study the impacts of ...

These Plants Evolved in Florida Millions of Years Ago: They May Be Gone in Decades

Apr. 2, 2024 — Scrub mints are among the most endangered plants you've probably never heard of. More than half of the 24 species currently known to exist are ...

Discovery of Amino Acid Unveils How Light Makes Plants Open

Mar. 26, 2024 — Scientists have uncovered a unique mechanism that regulates the opening of stomata in plants. Phosphorylation of the amino acid Thr881 on the plasma membrane proton pump plays a key role in this ...

Maize Genes Control Little Helpers in the Soil

Mar. 25, 2024 — Tiny organisms such as bacteria and fungi help to promote the health and function of plant roots. It is commonly assumed that the composition of these microbes is dependent on the properties of the ...

New Route to Recyclable Polymers from Plants

Mar. 25, 2024 — Cellulose, abundantly available from plant biomass, can be converted into molecules used to make a new class of recyclable polymers, to sustainably replace some ...

'Winners and Losers' as Global Warming Forces Plants Uphill

Mar. 25, 2024 — Some plant species will 'win' and others will 'lose' as global warming forces them to move uphill, new research ...

Bees Need Food Up to a Month Earlier Than Provided by Recommended Pollinator Plants

Mar. 22, 2024 — Plant species which are recommended as 'pollinator friendly' in Europe begin flowering up to a month too late for bees, resulting in low colony survival and low production of queens. This ...

Rose Essential Oil: A Safe Pesticide for Organic Agriculture

Mar. 21, 2024 — Following injury, plants release terpenoids to enhance their defenses. Researchers studying terpenoid-enriched essential oils (EOs) have found that rose EO (REO) can stimulate defense genes in tomato ...

Decoding the Plant World's Complex Biochemical Communication Networks

Mar. 21, 2024 — A research team has begun translating the complex molecular language of petunias. Their grammar and vocabulary are well hidden, however, within the countless proteins and other compounds that fill ...

Simple Trick Could Improve Accuracy of Plant Genetics Research

Mar. 13, 2024 — Researchers have published a simple trick that improves the accuracy of techniques that help us understand how external variables -- such as temperature -- affect gene activity in ...

Exploring Arctic Plants and Lichens: An Important Conservation Baseline for Nunavut's Newest and Largest Territorial Park

Mar. 13, 2024 — A comprehensive study of the floristic diversity of Agguttinni Territorial Park, Nunavut's newest and largest Territorial Park, has documented 141 vascular plant, 69 bryophyte, and 93 lichen ...

Marine Algae Implants Could Boost Crop Yields

Mar. 6, 2024 — Scientists have discovered the gene that enables marine algae to make a unique type of chlorophyll. They successfully implanted this gene in a land plant, paving the way for better crop yields on ...

Invasive Plant Time Bombs: A Hidden Ecological Threat

Mar. 6, 2024 — Invasive plants can stay dormant for decades or even centuries before rapidly expanding and wreaking ecological havoc, finds a new ...

Plant Lavender, Marjoram and Ivy on Your Green Wall to Clean Up the Air

Mar. 5, 2024 — Green walls can strip pollution from the air -- and some plants do it better than others, according to new research. Researchers planted 10 species on a custom-built 1.4m green ...

An Evolutionary Mystery 125 Million Years in the Making

Mar. 4, 2024 — Plant biologists have uncovered an evolutionary mystery over 100 million years in the making. It turns out that sometime during the last 125 million years, tomatoes and Arabidopsis thaliana plants ...

A New Plant's Name That Tells a Story

Mar. 1, 2024 — A new species and genus of fairy lantern, tiny glass-like white plants that feed on fungi, has been discovered in Japan. In the country renowned for its extensive flora research, the discovery of a ...

Common Plant Could Help Reduce Food Insecurity

Feb. 23, 2024 — An often-overlooked water plant that can double its biomass in two days, capture nitrogen from the air -- making it a valuable green fertilizer -- and be fed to poultry and livestock could serve as ...

Biomolecular Condensates -- Regulatory Hubs for Plant Iron Supply

Feb. 23, 2024 — Iron is a micronutrient for plants. Biologists now show that regulatory proteins for iron uptake behave particularly dynamically in the cell nucleus when the cells are exposed to blue light -- an ...

Altering the Circadian Clock Adapts Barley to Short Growing Seasons

Feb. 23, 2024 — To ensure that plants flower at the right time of year, they possess an internal clock, which enables them to measure the amount of daylight during a day. Biologists now describe that the mutation of ...

Feb. 21, 2024 — The tendency of communities and the species within them to become more similar or more distinct across landscapes -- biotic homogenization and differentiation -- are approximately balanced, according ...

New Evidence Shows UK Solar Parks Can Provide for Bees and Butterflies

Feb. 21, 2024 — A new study shows that UK solar parks, if managed correctly, can provide vital resources to help stem the decline in the nation's bees and butterflies. The new research provides peer-reviewed ...

Pollinator's Death Trap Turns Into Nursery

Feb. 19, 2024 — In a group of plants that is famous for luring its pollinators into a death trap, one species offers its flowers as a nursery in exchange. The discovery blurs the line between mutualism and ...

Asexual Propagation of Crop Plants Gets Closer

Feb. 15, 2024 — When the female gametes in plants become fertilized, a signal from the sperm activates cell division, leading to the formation of new plant seeds. This activation can also be deliberately triggered ...