White clover's toxic tricks traced to its hybridization

White clover is a weed that grows the world over—there's a good chance you have some growing in your yard today. The plant that yard-preeners love to hate was spawned about 20,000 years ago when two European clover species ...

Evolution in action: A new plant species in the Swiss Alps

A new plant species named Cardamine insueta appeared in the region of Urnerboden in the Swiss alps, after the land has changed from forest to grassland over the last 150 years. The inheritance of two key traits from its parent ...

Growing without cell division

An international team of scientists, including biologists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, may have pinpointed for the first time the mechanism responsible for cell polyploidy, a state in which cells ...

Maize hybrid looks promising for biofuel

Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have identified a new contender in the bioenergy race: a temperate and tropical maize hybrid. Their findings, published in GCB Bioenergy, show that the maize hybrid ...

Good parents are predictable -- at least when it comes to corn

In order to breed new varieties of corn with a higher yield faster than ever before, researchers at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, and other institutions are relying on a trick: early selection of the ...

Ancient cycads found to be pre-adapted to grow in groves

The ancient cycad lineage has been around since before the age of the dinosaurs. More recently, cycads also co-existed with large herbivorous mammals, such as the ice age megafauna that only went extinct a few tens of thousands ...

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