Plants spread their seeds across the landscape to colonize new areas, but it's difficult and expensive for biologists to trace their movements. Now, researchers at Portland State University have developed a new technique ...
Ecology
Dec 14, 2017
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10
Next-generation DNA sequencing technologies have flooded databases and hard drives worldwide with large data sets, but are researchers getting the most they can out of this deluge of data? In a new study in the October issue ...
Biotechnology
Nov 8, 2017
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3
The roots of most land plants are colonized by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which help their plant partners to grow while also influencing the wider environment. Their hidden nature has meant these fungi are poorly understood, ...
Biotechnology
Sep 29, 2017
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34
Tackling the problem of illegal logging is particularly challenging as it is often nearly impossible to tell where a piece of wood came from. Now, researchers in Oregon, USA, have developed a technique that uses the chemical ...
Environment
Jun 2, 2017
1
29
The ability to identify individual plant species from tiny amounts of material has a surprising range of uses, from monitoring bee populations to assessing the contents of food and nutritional supplements, as well as working ...
Biotechnology
Mar 16, 2017
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9
Humans have long had a knack for concentrating heavy metals that would otherwise remain at low concentrations within the environment. These human-produced pollutants can be found going back as far as one million years ago ...
Ecology
Feb 17, 2017
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24
Living trees can rot from the inside out, leaving only a hollowed trunk. Wood rot in living trees can cause overestimates of global carbon pools, timber loss in forestry, and poor tree health. Understanding wood decay in ...
Environment
Jan 5, 2017
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41
Unless we're weeding the garden or tripping over one sticking out of the ground, for most of us the root systems of plants are out of sight and out of mind. But, for nearly all plants, roots are essential. They are the conduit ...
Biotechnology
Nov 7, 2016
0
4
With the rapid rise of next-generation sequencing technologies, disparate fields from cancer research to evolutionary biology have seen a drastic shift in the way DNA sequence data is obtained. It is now possible to sequence ...
Biotechnology
Nov 1, 2016
0
6
Long-term, broad-scale ecological data are critical to plant research, but often impossible to collect on foot. Traditional data-collection methods can be time consuming or dangerous, and can compromise habitats that are ...
Ecology
Oct 31, 2016
0
26
