Timing is everything – for plants too

Organisms differ in their morphology between species, within species and even within individuals at different stages of development. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, ...

Get touchy feely with plants

Forget talking to plants to help them grow, gently rubbing them with your fingers can make them less susceptible to disease, a paper in the open access journal BMC Plant Biology reveals.

Membranes in tight corners

Photosynthesis takes place in specialized membrane systems, made up of stacked disks linked together by unstacked planar leaflets. A team of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich has now identified a protein that ...

That four-leaf clover you found may not be a four-leaf clover

(Phys.org) —Are four-leaf clovers becoming more common? That was the question put to me by a reader recently. Apparently her kids are finding four-leaf clovers on a daily basis as they walk home from school. What gives?

Leaflet

A leaflet in botany is a part of a compound leaf. A leaflet may resemble an entire leaf, but it is not borne on a stem as a leaf is, but rather on a vein of the whole leaf. Compound leaves are common in many plant families. For example, a tomato plant has compound leaves with leaflets.

Leaflets borne on the central vein of a leaf are referred to as pinnae; the compound leaves themselves are described as pinnate. A plant may be further subdivided in that the pinnae are themselves split into leaflets, or pinnules; these leaves are now twice pinnate, or bipinnate. A few plant species even have tripinnate leaves.

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