Herself’s Houseplants

This didn’t get much play in the press and that is a shame. It is the beginning of a brave new world for plants.

Scientists said on Wednesday they have finished the first genetic map of a plant in a groundbreaking achievement that could herald a new green revolution.

The tiny flowering weed Arabidopsis thaliana, or Thale cress, may not look like much but the sequencing of its genome, all its nearly 26,000 genes, provides the green chapter in the book of life and a blueprint for a greater understanding of all plants.

Scientists said knowing how its genes function and what they do will lead to hardier, more nutritious, higher yielding crops, better tasting and longer-lasting food and new insights into human diseases and how to treat them.

“Genome sequencing changes the way we do biology. From this point onwards plant science will never be the same again and genetics will never be the same again,” Professor Mike Bevan, of the John Innes plant research center in England, told a news conference. . . [ read more Scientists Harvest Plant Genome ]

Flying insects, comprising the vast majority of pollinators, stop at the plant to eat nectar and pick up pollen, which they then distribute as they visit additional flowers. Noted dePamphilis, “Pollinators are providing a very important service to the plant without which it couldn’t reproduce.”

To aid insects in finding the nectar — and thus, the pollen — many flowering plants have evolved to possess bright colors (hummingbirds and butterflies favor reds and yellows), as well as “nectar guides” that may only be visible in ultraviolet (UV) light—a wavelength of the light spectrum bees can see and people cannot. From a bee’s-eye-view, the UV colors and patterns in a flower’s petals dramatically announce the flower’s stash of nectar and pollen. [ read more Why are flowers beautiful? ]

One of the more interesting things we’ve learned lately is that many birds and insects see into the ultraviolet light spectrum, far beyond what we can see. So we are missing a big part of what makes flowers so interesting to them.

Carnivorous plants are some of my favorite plants. I’ve a Nepethenes who has pitchers big enough to catch small rodents, lizards and some of the Texas sized bugs we have down here. It was thought the trap was enough now we know they slime their prey as well.

. . . Since Charles Darwin’s time, the mechanism of insect-trapping by Nepenthes pitcher plants from the Asian tropics has intrigued scientists but is still incompletely understood. The slippery inner surfaces of their pitchers have – until now – been considered the key trapping devices, while it was assumed that the fluid secretions were only concerned with digestion. Gaume and Forterre were able to combine their separate expertise in biology and physics to show that the digestive fluid of Nepenthes rafflesiana actually plays a crucial role in prey capture. [ read more Carnivorous plants use pitchers of 'slimy saliva' to catch prey]