New plants for a dimmer future?
As anyone who merely glances at the titles of scientific articles will tell you, when ‘new species’ and ‘China’ are seen together it is usually a tale of ‘yet another’ extinct missing-link fossil from that amazing country (e.g. Pascal Godefroit et al., Nature Communications 4: 1436, 2013). Well, this time I'm pleased to report new plant taxa from China that are very much extant – if rather startled by all the attention they are receiving and the glare of the media spotlight (or any light come to that … ). The species concerned are three new members of the genus Pilea (the largest genus in the Urticaceae – the stinging nettle family; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilea), newly discovered in the karst limestone topography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karst) of south-west China. Of the trio, Pilea shizongensis, P. guizhouensis and P. cavernicola (formally described – in English, as now permitted by new IUCN rules – by Alex Monro et al. in PhytoKeys 19: 51–66, 2012), the latter is probably the most intriguing as it was found within caves (OK, there is a bit of a clue in its specific epithet … ). But not only is it a troglodyte (‘cave-dweller’; http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/troglodyte) – or, more technically, a sciophyte (‘a plant which grows in low light environments’; https://sites.google.com/site/darwiniuswiki/home/sciophyte) – it survives on light levels as low as 0·04 % of full sunlight (!!). Yep, I know what you're thinking: isn't nature clever to have evolved a plant that will actually grow in homes lit by those depressingly-gloomy-but-they-are-the-future, long-life, low-energy light bulbs (http://bit.ly/VUgBTx)! And talking of coming out of the shadows, the importance of another nettle – Urtica dioica (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettle), whose harvestable and weavable bast fibres (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bast_fibre) have long been used to produce fabric – has recently been underlined by Christian Bergfjord et al.'s discovery that this material was chosen in preference to locally available fabric made from flax in the Bronze Age (Scientific Reports 2: 664, 2012), approximately 2800 years ago. Irritatingly, nowhere in that article do they mention nettle by its scientific name – what is it with those so-called ‘sciences’ that don't use scientific names?!? Anyway, this discovery of fabric – probably derived from Austrian nettles – in a burial site in Denmark challenges previous assumptions that textile production in that period in northern Europe was solely based on local and non-specialized production, and emphasises the role of nettle as a textile plant of ancient commercial importance.
[For more on the ‘shady side’ of plant life, why not look at Charlotte Gommers et al.'s recent review in Trends in Plant Science 18: 65–71, 2013 – Ed.]
Image: Piccolo Namek/Wikimedia Commons.
Phytofoodophylogeny …
Working hard on your behalf, one of my many ‘spies’ has tipped me off about a ‘super blog with phylogenies of food plants and lots of hard details on botany and foods’. Plants and food? Tell me more! Well, espousing the view that ‘a person can learn a lot about plants through the everyday acts of slicing and eating them’, The Botanist in the Kitchen (http://botanistinthekitchen.wordpress.com/) ‘is devoted to exploring food plants in all their beautiful detail as plants – as living organisms with their own evolutionary history and ecological interactions’. The site – which is academic (from Drs Jeanne Osnas and Katherine Preston), but with recipes (from Michelle Fuerst) – has three goals: to share the fascinating biology of our food plants, to teach biology using edible, familiar examples, and to suggest delicious ways to bring the plants and their stories to your table. And it provides great material to underline the real reason botanists study plants – they feed us and almost every living thing we see around us! And to take your sensory pleasures further, why not check out one of 2012's more intriguingly entitled journals, Flavour (http://www.flavourjournal.com/), ‘a peer-reviewed, open access, online journal that publishes interdisciplinary articles on flavour, its generation and perception, and its influence on behaviour and nutrition’. Overseen by Editors-in-Chief Peter Barham (University of Bristol, UK) and Per Møller (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), the journal publishes articles ‘from all relevant disciplines including neuroscience, genetics, food chemistry, sensory science, psychology and philosophy’. And to whet your students' appetite for this new gastroscience fusion diet, why not explore Amy Rowat's opinion article entitled, ‘The molecules we eat: food as a medium to communicate science’ (Flavour 2: 10, 2013) as a hors d'oeuvre? Finally – well, you can have too much food! – is mention of Michelle's Accidental Scientist blog (http://accidentalscientist.blogspot.co.uk/). Michelle, from Kaneohe (Hawai'i, USA – the grass skirt state, where ‘the’ President comes from), has a PhD in Biology, but her real passion is food and she describes herself as ‘a scientist noshing and fumbling her way through the food world’. Lots of tasty treats and tit-bits here, many of which are very exotic (from this West Country lad's perspective at least!).
[The biggest surprise for me – for a new journal in the American-English-spelling-dominated world of global publishing – is that it has been permitted to use the ‘quaint’ English (UK) spelling ‘Flavour’. Maybe this is evidence that English cuisine is still a major force in the kitchens of the world? – Ed.]
Image: Keith Weller, USDA ARS.
Hair today; iHair tomorrow …
At the subterranean interface between ‘plant’ and ‘non-plant’ few structures play a more important role than root hairs – tiny, closed-ended tubular projections from single cells in the root's epidermis. Not only do they participate in uptake of water and nutrients, but in legumes they are also important in the initiation of nitrogen-fixing nodules (http://bit.ly/WOKtlM). Root hairs have also been beloved of developmental biologists for many years as model systems that can help to unravel the mysteries of plant cell development. So popular has their study become that keeping on top of all the weird and wonderful root hair phenotypes that have been unearthed is a full-time study in itself. To help the time-pressed rhizologist – and in keeping with the ‘i’-dominated technology world in which we currently live – we now have ‘iroothair.org’ (http://www.iroothair.org/), a ‘comprehensive database of root hair genomics information … to assist in the study of root hair development and system biology’. This ‘unique resource for root hair research that integrates the large volume of data related to root hair genomics in a single, curated and expandable database’ is freely available and showcased by Miroslaw Kwasniewski et al. (Plant Physiology 161: 28–35, 2013). The iRootHair service is maintained at the Department of Genetics, University of Silesia (Poland).
Image: From Chandler B. Beach (ed), The New Student's Reference Work, for teachers, students and families, F. E. Compton and Company, Chigaco, 1941.
Women on top …
As debates continue over gender-bias in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects and careers for women (e.g. Karen Purcell; http://bit.ly/UXSQdX), it is timely to celebrate three high-achieving female botanists. First is a real hard-core botanical appointment: Beverley Glover has just taken up the reins as the new Director of the Botanic Garden at the University of Cambridge (UK; http://bit.ly/14E6tBX), along with an associated Professorship in Plant Systematics and Evolution. Recognising the great opportunity to reach out to the wider public and impress upon them the importance of botany that the position represents, Prof. Glover is reported as saying that ‘the Botanic Garden is a central and much-loved part of both the University and the wider community. It is a great privilege and honour to be asked to lead its continued development’. And she is no stranger to accolades, having received the Linnean Society Bicentennial Medal in 2010 and the William Bate Hardy prize from the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 2011. Also at the University of Cambridge, Ottoline Leyser CBE FRS has recently taken over as Director of its Sainsbury Laboratory (http://www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/), as well as continuing her role as a Professor of Plant Development at the University's Department of Plant Sciences (http://bit.ly/YDrpG9). Commenting on her new role, Prof. Leyser said that ‘this is a really exciting time to be a plant biologist. We have an impressive array of tools and technologies to make rapid progress and the Sainsbury Laboratory will be at the forefront of a new integrative approach to understanding biological systems’. And Prof. Leyser will certainly be kept busy! She is additionally a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation, a Fellow of Clare College, the President of International Plant Molecular Biology, a member of the Council of the Royal Society, and Deputy Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. And from the home of the original Sainsbury Laboratory (http://www.tsl.ac.uk/), the John Innes Centre's Prof. Cathie Martin was last year elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for her distinguished contributions to plant biology (http://bit.ly/11VGGlK). Although 701 other scientists were similarly elevated, that honour is rarely bestowed on non-US scientists. Professor Martin believes the award recognises her ‘fundamental research into the nutritional benefits of plant-based foods and new features in publishing I have developed as editor-in-chief of The Plant Cell’. Whilst rightly celebrating those successes, one is reminded that there are also issues over the advancement of men in STEM careers (e.g. Andrew Moore; Bioessays 34: 1003, 2012). If we hear of any equivalent deserving male good news stories, we'll be sure to bring them to you!
Image: From a translation of Euclid's Elementa, attributed to Adelard of Bath, c. 1309–1316.
Scaring the crows …
One way of increasing crop productivity is to increase the amount of grain or other harvestable product that is actually harvested from the plant. To that end scarecrows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarecrow) were invented by human beings, although their success in that regard is inconsistent at best (is there a scientific study on the effectiveness of scarecrows just waiting to be done..?). However, another variation on the scarecrow theme aims to tackle productivity more directly, and shows quirkily that clues to above-ground productivity can come from ‘down-below’. Investigating any similarities between the endodermis in roots [‘the central, innermost layer of cortex in some land plants … a … ring of endodermal cells that are impregnated with hydrophobic substances (Casparian Strip) to restrict apoplastic flow of water to the inside’; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endodermis] and the sheath of mesophyll cells that surround the vascular bundles in leaves of C4 photosynthetic plants (the so-called Kranz anatomy, which is the site of net CO2 fixation into photosynthesis; http://bit.ly/X4cm99) such as maize, Thomas Slewinski et al. have discovered that a transcription factor called ‘SCARECROW’ is involved in development of both (Plant Cell Physiology 53: 2030–2037, 2012). [A transcription factor is a protein that ‘binds to specific DNA sequences, thereby controlling the flow (or transcription) of genetic information from DNA to m(essenger)RNA’; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_factor.] Scarecrow is more usually associated with various issues of cell identity and cell-patterning in subterranean roots [http://www.wikigenes.org/e/gene/e/824589.html – a ‘wiki’ that incidentally has the serious scientific credibility of combining ‘collaborative and largely altruistic possibilities of wikis with explicit authorship’ – Robert Hoffman (Nature Genetics 40: 1047–1051, 2008)], so establishing its role in above-ground Kranz anatomy is interesting, and testament to a high degree of molecular economy in plant design principles. But the real hope is that this knowledge can now be exploited to convert C3 photosynthetic plants into Kranz-bearing C4 ones, which are photosynthetically more efficient than their C3 poor-relations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation). Set against a backdrop of global concerns about sufficiency of current crops to provide enough food for a growing world population, this C3 to C4 conversion is one of the holy grails (e.g. Richard Leegood, Journal of Experimental Botany 53: 581–590, 2002; Udo Gowik and Peter Westhoff, Plant Physiology 155: 56–63, 2011; Rowan Sage and Xin-Guang Zhu, Journal of Experimental Botany 62: 2989–3000, 2011), if not the Grand Challenge (Sarah Covshoff and Julian Hibberd, Current Opinion in Biotechnology 23: 209–214, 2012), of plant physiology, and doubtless has many more years to run. However, rather than add extra cell layers, etc, into C3 plants, might it not be easier to engineer the neat trick of having both C4 and C3 photosynthesis in the same cell, as naturally exists in such plants as the hydrophyte Hydrilla verticillata (e.g. Srinath K. Rao et al., Plant Physiology 130: 876–88, 2002)? Sadly, I can take no credit for that suggestion(!), but see the experiences of Mitsue Miyao et al. and their attempts to effect this in C3 rice (Journal of Experimental Botany 62: 3021–3029, 2011). However, if you want to dabble in such areas, you'll probably want to keep such work under wraps, or in the confines of the lab since Hydrilla has been hailed as ‘the perfect aquatic weed’ by Kenneth Langeland (Castanea 61: 293–304, 1996). Which gives me an idea: if it is allowed to escape and colonise the rest of the planet's waterways with regrettable – but necessary! – elimination of native flora we'd have converted huge areas of the planet to more productive C4 photosynthesis at a stroke. If only we can eat the stuff, future food security will have been secured..? Isn't science and a little bit of imagination great!? Who said scientists can't be creative?
[Please do not attempt to test mischievous Mr P. Cuttings' ‘Hydrilla hypothesis’ at home; and certainly not outdoors! – Ed.]
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Yes, but WHY?
Finally, and on a related ‘down-under’ theme, I pose this question: just because we can, does that mean we should? After all, they do say that the devil makes work for idle hands (http://bit.ly/WOZ2Wp). Well, although that imagery may be a little extreme, sometimes you suspect that highly trained individuals could be better employed. Take for instance the revelation that ‘Australian researchers have developed a “pina colada” pineapple’ (http://bit.ly/XOwgDg). Although the report is keen to point out that the goal of the work – by Queensland State University's Department of Agriculture – was actually to develop ‘nice flavoured pineapple. We're looking for a variety that is sweet, low acid and aromatic’, not specifically a coconut-flavoured one, you've still got to wonder: why? Hey-ho, time to put another slice of coconapple on the barbie?
Image: Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen. Gera-Untermhaus, 1897.