The Ripe Stuff – Part 3: How Plants Respond to Ethylene

Sniffing Out Ethylene
In the previous post I summarized the latest information on how the plant hormone ethylene is made (at least in the model plant Arabidopsis).
Though most people are familiar with the plant hormone ethylene mainly because of its effects on fruit ripening, the list of plant responses to ethylene is long.
How do plants [...]

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The Ripe Stuff – Part 2: How Plants Make Ethylene

C’est un gaz. Es un gas. Es ist ein gas. It’s a Gas!
If you are familiar with the gaseous plant hormone ethylene, it’s most likely because of its ability to promote fruit ripening in apples, bananas, tomatoes, etc..
Ethylene also affects many other aspects of a plant’s life cycle, including seed germination, growth and development, [...]

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The Ripe Stuff: Green Tomatoes, Bananas & Ethylene

Fried Green Tomatoes
About this time of year in the North Temperate Zone people may be getting very tired of fried green tomatoes and green tomato pie.
As a plant physiologist, I was often asked how to ripen green tomatoes. (Rather than go into this here, I’ll refer you to this recent blogpost.)
You probably already know [...]

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How Plants Make Flowers – Part 5: Photoperiod, Biological Clocks, and Florigen

It’s Time to Flower!
The correct timing of flowering is essential to maximize reproductive success in angiosperms.
And many flowering plants rely on the photoperiod (specifically, the relative night length) as an environmental signal to tell seasonal time. (To see how, please see previous posts about How Plants Tell Time and Why Plants Tell Time.)
As mentioned in [...]

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How Plants Make Flowers – Part 4: Genetics of Flowering

The Long and Winding Road
So far, this journey through the subject of how plants make flowers has consisted of three parts:
Part 1, an introduction to the flowering hormone florigen,
…Part 2, how environmental cues affect flowering,
..and, Part 3, how the size and age of the plant itself may trigger flowering.
The Players
Because the genetic story of [...]

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Life in the Phyllosphere: What Microbes Commonly Dwell on the Surface of Leaves?

Leaf Surfaces = Microbial Habitats
Imagine all the leaves of all the plants currently living on planet Earth.
Now, add up all the surface areas of all of those leaves.
And your answer is?… No idea?….
Luckily, some microbiologists have made an estimate, and it’s an astounding number.
According to a current review (see ref 1 below), the terrestrial [...]

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How Plants Make Flowers – Part 3: Endogenous Cues

Is There a Single Flower-Inducing Hormone?
Florigen is the signal that triggers the transition from vegetative to reproductive development in plants that flower in response to photoperiod.
But some plants, that I’ll refer to “Night-Neutral” (a.k.a., “Day-Neutral”), apparently initiate flowering because of factors other than night length.
Such plants may flower after attaining a certain size or [...]

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How Plants Make Flowers – Part 2: Environmental Cues

Many Plants Flower in Response to Night Length
For nearly 100 years scientists have been trying to identify the elusive flowering hormone called florigen.
Early in the last century two USDA researchers took a major step toward this by discovering how to induce flowering in plants under controlled conditions. In 1920, these two scientists, W.W. Garner and [...]

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How Plants Make Flowers

The Mystery of the Flowering Hormone
What if you discovered a chemical that, when sprayed onto the leaves of plants, would induce them to flower?
How much do you think the patent on such a chemical would be worth? Especially to the agricultural and horticultural industries.
And what if I told you that scientific evidence for the existence [...]

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Does the Moon Affect Plants? Part 3: Gravitational Effects?

Does the Moon’s Gravity Affect Trees?
To me this sounds like a silly question.
Why?
Because I’d no more expect the moon’s gravity to affect trees than it affects the water in a pond or swimming pool.
If the moon doesn’t elicit tidal effects in such small bodies of water, then why would it’s gravity affect trees?
But, largely due [...]

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