News tagged with plant pollen

Flower power: How to get ahead in advertising

Some plants go to extraordinary lengths to attract pollinators. A unique collaboration between plant scientists and physicists is revealing the full extent of botanical advertising.

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Feb 03, 2012 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

How does a plant survive with few mates or pollinators? A European herb has figured out its own way

In plants that rely on animals for pollination, the number of seeds they produce, or their relative fitness, is influenced by pollinator visits and the successful deposition of pollen. The number of visits ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Nov 10, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Why are orchids so successful?

In terms of diversity, orchids are one of the most successful groups of flowering plants, with over 22,000 species. Both pollinating animals and mycorrhizal fungi are believed to have been important in the ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Sep 13, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Team shows how the honey bee tolerates some synthetic pesticides

A new study reveals how enzymes in the honey bee gut detoxify pesticides commonly used to kill mites in the honey bee hive. This is the first study to tease out the precise molecular mechanisms that allow ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Jul 20, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Female mate choice enhances offspring fitness in an annual herb

In many organisms females directly or indirectly select mates (or sperm) and potentially influence the fitness of their offspring. Mate choice and sexual selection in plants is more complex in some ways than ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Jun 27, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

New research shows organic farming benefits insect biodiversity, pollination of wild plants

(PhysOrg.com) -- New research just published by ecologists at Trinity College Dublin, has shown that organic farming benefits insect biodiversity, insect-flower interactions and pollination of wild plants.

Biology / Ecology

created Jun 23, 2011 | popularity 2 / 5 (1) | comments 0

Clues on how flowering plants spread

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have long scratched their heads over the Earth’s dazzling array of flowering plants. While conifers took 300 million years to yield hundreds of species, flowering plants diversified ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Jun 21, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Sexual plant reproduction: Male and female talk in the same way as do cells in your brain

A team of researchers at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia (IGC), Portugal, discovered that pollen, the organ that contains the plant male gametes, communicate with the pistil, their female counterpart, ...

Biology / Cell & Microbiology

created Mar 17, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0

Biologists discover 'control center' for sperm production

Biologists at the University of Leicester have published results of a new study into the intricacies of sex in flowering plants.

Biology / Cell & Microbiology

created Feb 02, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

The production of plant pollen is regulated by several signalling pathways

(PhysOrg.com) -- Plants producing flower pollen must not leave anything to chance. The model plant thale cress (Arabidopsis), for instance, uses three signalling pathways in concert with partially overlapping ...

Biology / Biotechnology

created Jan 25, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Gatekeeper for tomato pollination identified

Tomato plants use similar biochemical mechanisms to reject pollen from their own flowers as well as pollen from foreign but related plant species, thus guarding against both inbreeding and cross-species hybridization, report ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Dec 23, 2010 | popularity not rated yet | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Mildew-resistant and infertile

Two proteins involved in powdery mildew infection in plants also play an important role in fertilization.

Biology / Biotechnology

created Nov 24, 2010 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Fertility or powdery mildew resistance?

Powdery mildew is a fungus that infects both crop and ornamental plants. Each year, powdery mildew and other plant pathogens cause immense crop loss. Despite decades of intense research, little is known of the plant molecules ...

Biology / Biotechnology

created Nov 12, 2010 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Study suggests dinosaurs killed off by more than one asteroid

(PhysOrg.com) -- Dinosaurs, along with over half of other species, became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period about 65.5 million years ago, and many scientists believe this was due to a single impact ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Aug 31, 2010 | popularity 4.2 / 5 (19) | comments 24 | with audio podcast report

Pollen Folds Like Origami

For those of us with allergies, springtime pollen is an invisible nuisance. But under the high-powered microscopes of Eleni Katifori, a biophysicist at Rockefeller University in New York, the grains of plant ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Apr 20, 2010 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (4) | comments 1 | with audio podcast