Orchid pollination? It's just not cricket!
While many people in the UK and South Africa have been watching the international cricket series between the two countries over the winter months, it seems that an almost equally high number have been clicking on the BBC's website to view another type of cricket entirely, in what has become one of the most talked about botanical news stories of recent times (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8391540.stm). And I'm pleased to say that the source of the excitement is an article that appears in this month's Annals of Botany (105: 355–364). So what's the fuss about? The identification of a pollinating role for a cricket (a member of the insect order Orthoptera) on the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Réunion. Not only is this a ‘first’ for that insect order, the species involved – the Raspy Cricket, Glomeremus sp. – is new to science. To find out more, read the article in this issue or online, where it's free-to-view at http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/annbot/orth.html. One of the discoverers is Claire Micheneau, a researcher at the Université de La Réunion also attached to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and her intriguing find helps to round off a great 250th anniversary year of botanical discoveries for that venerable British institution (http://www.physorg.com/news180706118.html). The object of the cricket's attentions is an orchid – Angraecum cadetii – which plant group's amazingly bizarre sexual intrigues, entanglements and subterfuges with their better-known insect pollinators are explored in a paper in the American Naturalist (175: 98–105, 2010). A little bird tells me that one or two other journals were reluctant to publish the cricket paper because they didn't think that it would be of sufficient general interest – how wrong they were!
Image: Claire Micheneau.
There's old in them thar hills …
If put on the spot, I'm guessing that most of you – like me – would have said that bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva) were the oldest plants on the planet. True, they can certainly reach great ages – over 4600 years (PNAS 106: 20348–20353, 2009) – but a recent study from the University of California (PLoSONE 4(12): e8346. doi:10·1371/journal.pone.0008346) makes these look like mere infants in the longevity stakes. May et al. propose that a stem cluster of Palmer's oak (Quercus palmeri) growing in the Juruba Hills in southern California represents one clonal individual and is estimated to be >13 000 years old. Sadly, with no other members of the same species nearby to pollinate it, it seems destined to reproduce clonally. So, a long life, but a lonely one, it would seem. However, as old as that oak is, it is probably not the oldest living plant; which honour may belong to a quaking aspen in Utah – reputedly 80 000 years old – or a holly in Tasmania that may be 43 000 years old, according to the Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-sci-oak23-2009dec23,0,2005264.story). Now I don't know about you, but since both bristlecones and Palmer's oaks grow in California, one wonders if there's something they put in the water or the air that promotes long life. If so, perhaps the state's Governor – one Mr A. Schwarzenegger – ought to update his most famous movie catchphrase from ‘I'll be back’ to ‘I'll be here forever’?
Image: May et al./PLoS ONE.
What's in a name? Everything!
Some of the most important or worthy items don't necessarily have the most memorable or newsworthy of titles. Take for instance the rather dryly named ‘An update of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification for the orders and families of flowering plants: APG III’ (Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 161: 105–121, 2009); however, next to a good English (United Kingdom version!) dictionary, the outcomes of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) are essential to accurate reporting of plant biological work (at least for anyone who is concerned to provide correct names and taxonomies of the plants they worked with). This latest article provides a revised and updated classification for the families of flowering plants and feeds into the International Plant Names Index (IPNI) (http://www.ipni.org/index.html). The IPNI is a database of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of seed plants, ferns and fern allies. Reassuringly, IPNI's data are freely available and are gradually being standardised and checked, and it aims to be a dynamic resource, depending on direct contributions by all members of the botanical community. As the definitive site to check plant species' names, the IPNI is the one that the Annals of Botany links to in its Instructions for Authors. Since the IPNI reported changes for >27 000 plant name records in October 2009 – which ‘is not unusual, or anything new!’ (!!) – it needs to be checked fairly regularly to ensure botanical practitioners are up to date.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Avoid forest fires, keep plants dry!
Taken at face value this seems a bizarre thing to say, and do. Should it be taken at face value? No! So what is the truth behind that rather sensationalist headline? It relates to what could happen if the sun's rays are focussed onto combustible material in a forest for long enough by droplets of water on plant surfaces. A study by Ádám Egri et al. (New Phytologist 185: 979–987, 2010) examines this intriguing notion, and the possibility of plants getting sunburned by water droplets. The group, which comprises a physicist, a meteorologist and a biologist, largely conclude that there may be issues with droplets on hairy plant surfaces (which tend to retain the water), but not on glabrous ones, which shed the water more readily. Interestingly, amongst the supplementary data for the article are details of websites dealing with the issues of sunburn, forest fires, and leaf burn from sunlight focussed through water droplets for those who want to know more. Curiously, they don't seem to consider any possibility of such water droplets acting as lenses to focus sunlight onto chlorenchymatous tissues and maybe enhancing photosynthesis. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this story is the online debate that has been generated by this article, or, rather, by the media hype surrounding it in the press. To see the sort of to-do that has resulted, interested readers are directed to The Garden Professors' blog at Washington State University, USA (https://sharepoint.cahnrs.wsu.edu/blogs/urbanhort/archive/2010/01/20/help-help-the-sky-is-falling.aspx and https://sharepoint.cahnrs.wsu.edu/blogs/urbanhort/archive/2010/02.aspx). There you will find enthusiastic criticism of the article and an interesting dialogue between a ‘Garden Professor’ and one of the article's authors. The spirit of scientific debate is alive and well in the blogosphere.
Image: Egri et al./New Phytologist.
Bill and Mel dish out the dosh
That's Bill and Melinda Gates, two of the three co-Chairs of the … Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Love him or hate him, Bill (yes, co-founder of Microsoft, that Bill) is keen to distribute some of his huge fortune to good causes, as will be seen in the 2010 Annual Letter from Bill Gates (http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/2010/Pages/bill-gates-annual-letter.aspx). With interests across a wide range of areas, it is perhaps its agricultural aspirations that are most relevant to this column, for which the Foundation aims to ‘fund projects focused on the specific growing conditions in developing countries and the crops that are grown by poor farmers’. In that regard, one of the recipients of the Gates' benevolence is the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP) at the University of York in the UK, which has just produced the first genetic map of the medicinal herb Artemisia annua (Science 327: 328–331, 2010). Artemisia produces artemesinin, the active ingredient in the most effective treatment of malaria, a preventable and treatable global disease but which is estimated to kill >1 million people annually. The information will be used to accelerate plant breeding programmes to develop higher-yielding crops for use by an army of small-scale growers in Africa and Asia, for whom the Artemisia crop is an important source of income, and where malaria is an ever-present threat. This work is being helped by CNAP's second grant from the Gates' Foundation. It is nice to think that Bill may be remembered for something useful rather than that pesky paper clip thingy. Though maybe a new category should be added when Clippy pops up: ‘you seem to be about to make a substantial charitable donation, would you like help with that … ?’.
Image: Davies et al. Annals of Botany 104: 315–323.
What connects soybean, Wollemi pine and strawberries?
Like cassava (http://www.phytozome.net/cassava), maize (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49808/title/ Corn_genome_a_maze_of_unusual__diversity), and Artemisia (see previous item), these three have had aspects of their genomes recently sequenced. Soybean (Glycine max) is the first legume to have been sequenced (Nature 463: 178–183, 2010). Not only is soybean one of the world's most important crop plants for its seeds' protein and oil content, its below-ground capacity to fix atmospheric nitrogen via symbioses with soil-borne microbes makes it a key player in the ecologically, economically and agriculturally important nitrogen cycle. Hopes are therefore high that this knowledge will help to unlock the secrets of the 20 000 or so legume species and help to pave the way for their improvement. As another item in our ‘did you do anything interesting at college today?’ section we report news of a student group at the University of New South Wales, Australia, who have sequenced the 180 000 nucleotides of the chloroplast genome of Wollemi pine (http://www.science.unsw.edu.au/news/students-sequence-genome-of-the-wollemi-pine/). Widely regarded as extinct, the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) was rediscovered in a remote part of Australia in 1994. Preliminary findings show that its chloroplast DNA is unique but shares some features with other pines such as the Kauri and Norfolk Island pine. It is hoped that further analysis will provide clues to the evolution of the Wollemi and other pines. Finally, a break-through that may not actually have happened – yet. A news release (http://www.physorg.com/news182453558.html) – purportedly provided by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) – stated that the genome of the strawberry had been sequenced. If true, then as a potential model system for the Rosaceae it would be great news for a mouth-watering range of economically important fruits, nuts and horticultural plants such as apples, almonds, and roses. However, and obligingly, at the foot of that item a comment has been posted by Kevin Folta (apparently of the Strawberry Genome Sequencing Consortium) who states that ‘The strawberry genome sequence is not complete … The news release above was a premature and highly inaccurate dissemination from the USDA. The strawberry genome has not been published, it has not been released, and analysis is not complete’. So, remember, you didn't hear it here first. Triumphs of the gene-jockeys' art that these discoveries/nearly discoveries no doubt are, arguably the sequencing is the easy bit: trying to work out what all those teeny-weeny bits of DNA do is quite another.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Watch out! Plagiarism's about
Have you ever read a scientific article and thought ‘that's a nice phrase, but I'm sure I've seen it somewhere else before’? Well, if you have, then those days may soon disappear thanks to a new initiative by the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB). Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell (both published on behalf of the ASPB) now offer a ‘valuable new voluntary service to authors of articles submitted to either journal for review’ (Plant Physiology 152: 3, 2010). Called CrossCheck, it is powered by iThenticate (which is also responsible for TurnItIn, a plagiarism-checking service used by many universities in the UK and elsewhere for checking students' work). The program compares a submitted manuscript to a database of previously published articles to detect possible cases of plagiarism or republished research. Reassuringly, the ASPB will pay the CrossCheck-ing fees, but neither the editors nor staff will view or have any knowledge of the reports. The ASPB journals believe that CrossCheck offers corresponding authors an easy way of identifying such problems, ‘which are usually completely unintentional’. Coincidentally, that's what my naughty students claim when challenged about their TurnItIn scores.
Image: from http://www.famousplagiarists.com/scienceandmedicine.htm.
Immigrants threaten locals
This is the sort of headline you might read in certain newspapers who advocate tougher border controls to check the spread of humanity from one area to another. But in this instance it is plants that are the problem, albeit not without an anthropogenic dimension. Although often introduced by the unwary because the foreign plants were pleasing to the eye of the beholder, problems only usually become apparent after a few years when the interloper escapes from the confines of the garden or country estate and ousts the indigenous competition from its adopted home. Recognising the threats that such species can cause to local biodiversity, laws have been introduced to curb such ‘botanical over-zealousness’. Recently, the UK government has added a further 38 plant species to the list of those that it is illegal to plant or release into the wild in the UK because of the damage they wreak on home-grown ecosystems (http://www.defra.gov.uk/wildlife-pets/wildlife/management/non-native/s9-bansale.htm). Marten Winter and colleagues (PNAS 106: 21721–21725, 2009) present evidence that such introductions have a more profound effect on a bigger stage. Identifying plant movements in Europe since 1500 ad, they found that approx. 1600 non-European species had been introduced to the existing 11 000 ‘native’ species, but that another approx. 1700 native species had also been introduced to new areas within Europe. Encouragingly, only two species were considered to be extinct from Europe, but around 500 species were deemed to be locally extinct within Europe. Whilst biodiversity is increasing in all regions of Europe due to high numbers of alien species, at the same time Europe's plant communities are becoming increasingly more homogenous because alien species are distributed relatively consistently over the continent. This biological depletion is regarded as a consequence of global change associated with increasing pressure on the environment (e.g. the intensification of agriculture, the loss of habitat diversity, urbanisation, increasing global traffic and excessive nutrient influx into ecosystems). Should we be concerned? Are humans not part of the natural order of things? If so, what they do – even if it is the inadvisable translocation of highly invasive plants around the globe – must also be part of that grand scheme, too. Native populations should therefore adapt or perish. Whatever happened to that good old struggle for existence?
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Mushrooms from mosses?
No, not a weird trans-kingdom transmogrification, but an allusion to the discovery that ‘the round capsules of sphagnum moss blow their lids and launch a burst of reddish spores relatively high in “a beautiful mushroom cloud”’, according to Joan Edwards of Williams College in the USA (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/52884/title/ Moss_counters_shortness_with_A-bomb-style_clouds). When you're small and close to the ground, height is everything when it comes to dispersing your spores in the hope that they will travel to suitable environments to germinate and establish a new population. To get the ‘heads-up’ in that race, some mosses exploit the phenomenon of the vortex ring, which hitherto was apparently previously only known amongst animals, but which gives them much-needed extra lift. Using this technique the spores can reach heights 10–20 times greater than would be possible if the spores were simply shot out like bullets from a gun. This revelation was unveiled at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and images of the moving cloud of spores have yet to be released by the research team, pending acceptance of the work by a scientific journal. But has this work already been anticipated? Eagle-eyed readers of this journal may recall last month's article by Sebastian Sundberg of Uppsala University (Annals of Botany 105: 291–300, 2010) entitled, ‘Size matters for violent discharge height and settling speed of Sphagnum spores: important attributes for dispersal potential’ (http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/105/2/291). Although that article dealt with many aspects of the spore-release process it did not mention the vortices specifically, so it looks like Edwards' work is not spoiled. Which all goes to show that even for the most unlikely sounding of scientific questions, there's more than one person studying them, and more than one lot of interesting discoveries to be made: science – something for everyone!
Image: Sebastian Sundberg/Annals of Botany.
Phytosymbology, font of all knowledge
It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, the arithmetic may be debatable, but unless you know what words the picture represents it is a meaningless exercise. In an attempt to develop a codified system of phytological pictographs, Niki Simpson – FLS and digital botanical illustrator – has developed a new set of botanical symbols and corresponding font (Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 162: 117–129, 2010): why? Taking her inspiration from one of Sweden's greatest sons – Karl von Linné – she acknowledges the important role that symbols can have in delivering concise scientific descriptions of plants. Finding that there was no standard international botanical symbol set in current use, and that satisfactory symbols for some of the meanings that were needed did not exist, and realising that only a few of the required symbols were readily available as characters within standard fonts, she was inspired to rectify this deficiency. The new font – Simpson Botany Symbols.otf – is an OpenType font that is suitable for both PC and MAC use. For further details and to download the font set, which is free, go to http://www.nikisimpson.co.uk/symbols.html. Page space in publication is everything these days (as I'm reminded to conclude this month's column about here) and anything that helps to improve information flow and increase conciseness is to be applauded.
Image: Niki Simpson/Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.
Nigel ChaffeyE-mail: n.chaffey@bathspa.ac.ukCite as: Chaffey N. 2010. Plant Cuttings, March. Annals of Botany 105(3): iii–vi.