Even closely related plants produce their own natural chemical cocktails, each set uniquely adapted to the individual plant's specific habitat.

Researchers from the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech have identified the region of a large family of virulence proteins in oomycete plant pathogens that enables the proteins to enter the cells of their hosts.

Steroids bulk up plants just as they do human athletes, but the playbook of molecular signals that tell the genes to boost growth and development in plant cells is far more complicated than in human and animal cells.

The adage that your enemies know your weaknesses best is especially true in the case of plants and predators that have co-evolved: As the predators evolve new strategies for attack, plants counter with their own unique defenses.

Three plant biologists at Rutgers' Waksman Institute of Microbiology are obsessed with duckweed, a tiny aquatic plant with an unassuming name. Now they have convinced the federal government to focus its attention on duckweed's tremendous potential for cleaning up pollution, combating global warming and feeding the world.

Standing in a greenhouse at the University of Rhode Island, Rebecca Brown was smiling even though it appeared that something had gone terribly wrong. Almost all of the 16 species of grass she planted last February in hundreds of small pots were dead.

As anyone who has suffered from jetlag knows, we have internal clocks that tell us when to sleep and wake, and we can be miserable when these are disrupted.

Plants are very selective when it comes to choosing mates. Flowering plant pollination systems are clever devices for attracting pollinators like birds, ants, and insects, but there are also mechanisms for keeping out unwanted pollen.

Walking through a tropical or temperate forest immediately impresses us with the myriad forms and soaring structures of the plant world, but our knowledge of how plants are actually built, cell by cell, is still incomplete.

Energy from the sun and carbon dioxide fuel photosynthesis in plants and algae, making life on earth possible. Carbon that is fixed by plants is converted to starch and sucrose, which are utilized by plants for energy and to build biomass.

The hardiest plants and those most likely to survive the climatic shifts brought about by global warming are now easier to identify, thanks to new research findings by a team from Queen's University.

Biologists have discovered that a fundamental building block in the cells of flowering plants evolved independently, yet almost identically, on a separate branch of the evolutionary tree--in an ancient plant group called lycophytes that originated at least 420 million years ago.