Mindzilla – Plant Sciences

Plant Sciences

Hot Urban Temperatures and Tree Transpiration

July 31, 2020
Mindzilla

Washington, DC — Shade from urban trees has long been understood to offer respite from the urban heat island effect, a phenomenon that can result in city centres that are 1-3 degrees Centigrade warmer...

Research Suggests Crop Plants Are Taking up Microplastics

July 17, 2020
Mindzilla

Beijing, China — Microplastics (MPs), i.e., tiny plastic particles less than 5 millimetres in length, can now be found throughout the ocean and other aquatic ecosystems, and even in our seafood and...

Enzymes as Double Agents: New Mechanism Discovered in Protein Modification

July 9, 2020
Mindzilla

Münster, Germany — Proteins are the workers in a cell and, as the “basic element of life”, are responsible for the most widely varying metabolic processes. In plants, for example, they...

New Biotinylation Enzyme for Analyzing Protein-Protein Interactions

July 7, 2020
Mindzilla

Matsuyama, Japan — Proteins control many physiological functions that are essential for living things in vivo. There are over 20,000 types of proteins in humans, and each protein plays a different...

Algae as Living Biocatalysts for Green Industry

July 6, 2020
Mindzilla

Bochum, Germany — Better still: living algae can be used as biocatalysts for certain substances, and they bring the co-substrate along, producing it in an environmentally friendly manner through photosynthesis....

Moss Protein Corrects Genetic Defects of Other Plants

July 6, 2020
Mindzilla

Bonn, Germany — Almost all land plants employ an army of molecular editors who correct errors in their genetic information. Together with colleagues from Hanover, Ulm and Kyoto (Japan), researchers...

Redox States in Subcellular Compartments of Plant Cells Estimated with Protein Sensors

July 2, 2020
Mindzilla

Hong Kong, China — By introducing fluorescence protein sensors into live plants, a novel method that allows in planta measurement of NADPH level and NADH/NAD+ ratio in different cell types has been...

The Mystery of Pollen Sterility and Its Reversion in Pigeon Pea Revealed in a New Study

July 1, 2020
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Vienna, Austria — This work has been published in The Plant Genome very recently. This study has analyzed one environment-sensitive genic male sterile (EGMS) line that exhibited fertility transition...

Biologists Unravel Tangled Mystery of Plant Cell Growth

June 23, 2020
Mindzilla

Riverside, CA — When cells don’t divide into proper copies of themselves, living things fail to grow as they should. For the first time, scientists now understand how a protein called TANGLED1...

How Bacteria Fertilize Soya

June 3, 2020
Mindzilla

Zürich, Switzerland — Plants need nitrogen in the form of ammonium if they are to grow. In the case of a great many cultivated plants, farmers are obliged to spread this ammonium on their fields as...

New Biosensor Visualizes Stress in Living Plant Cells in Real Time

June 2, 2020
Mindzilla

La Jolla, CA — Plant biologists have long sought a deeper understanding of foundational processes involving kinases, enzymes that catalyze key biological activities in proteins. Analyzing the processes...

Self-Isolation or Keep Calm and Carry on — the Plant Cell’s Dilemma

April 15, 2020
Mindzilla

Norwich, UK — Self-isolation in the face of a marauding pathogen may save lives but it comes at the expense of life-sustaining essentials such as transport, communication and connectivity. This...

Hormone Produced in Starved Leaves Stimulates Roots to Take Up Nitrogen

April 14, 2020
Mindzilla

Nagoya, Japan — Nagoya University researchers have found that in response to the nitrogen demand of leaves, plants produce a hormone that travels from the leaves to the roots to stimulate the uptake...

Mutation Reduces Energy Waste in Plants

April 9, 2020
Mindzilla

Bochum, Germany — To this end, the team identified several thousand proteins, determined their respective amounts in mutant and reference lines and combined the findings with measurements of photosynthetic...

Better Plant Edits by Enhancing DNA Repair

April 9, 2020
Mindzilla

Thuwal, Saudi Arabia — A new genome editing system enhances the efficiency of an error-free DNA repair pathway, which could help improve agronomic traits in multiple crops. Genome editing involves...

Researchers Show How Forest Loss Leads to Spread of Disease

April 8, 2020
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Stanford, CA — Viruses that jump from animals to people, like the one responsible for COVID-19, will likely become more common as people continue to transform natural habitats into agricultural land,...

Pollen-Based ‘Paper’ Holds Promise for New Generation of Natural Components

April 7, 2020
Mindzilla

Singapore — Scientists at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) have created a paper-like material derived from pollen that bends and curls in response to changing levels...

Making Biofuels Cheaper by Putting Plants to Work

April 7, 2020
Mindzilla

Berkeley, CA — Biofuels are an important part of the broader strategy to replace petroleum-based gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels that we use today. However, biofuels have so far not reached cost parity...

Study Identifies New Temperature Sensing Mechanism in Plants

April 6, 2020
Mindzilla

Riverside, CA — A protein called phytochrome B, which can sense light and temperature, triggers plant growth and controls flowering time. How it does so is not fully understood. In a paper published...

Researchers Discover a Novel Chemistry to Protect Our Crops from Fungal Disease

March 30, 2020
Mindzilla

Exeter, UK — Pathogenic fungi pose a huge and growing threat to global food security. Currently, we protect our crops against fungal disease by spraying them with anti-fungal chemistries,...

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