Over the past 20 years or so, there has been a revolution in the plant world. If you are a gardener you may have noticed that some plants are no longer where they used to be in the guide books because they have been moved into different families. As Professor Simon Hiscock, Director of the Botanic Garden, explains, the reason is ‘molecular phylogenetics’.

China is enhancing its efforts to battle plant diseases spreading in the country's wheat and rape plantations.

Plants are not only smart, but they also wage a good fight, according to a University of Missouri biochemist. Previous studies have shown that plants can sense attacks by pathogens and activate their defenses.

Now for some "shocking" news about plants: Exposing plants to electricity can boost production of useful plant chemicals and may provide a cheaper, safer, and more efficient method for producing medicines, pesticides, and other commercially important plant-based materials, researchers in Arizona and Oklahoma report.

Imagine you are a rice breeder and one day within a large field you discover a plant that has just the characteristics you have been looking for. You happily take your special plant to the laboratory where you find out that the spontaneous, beneficial event was due to inactivation of a single gene. This is a great observation; however, there are many different strains grown in different parts of the world, well adapted to the particular region they grow in.

Fungi do not have sexes, just so-called mating types. A new study being published today in the prestigious journal PLoS shows that there are great similarities between the parts of DNA that determine the sex of plants and animals and the parts of DNA that determine mating types in certain fungi.

Some soil microorganisms are capable of forging associations with plant roots in the form of symbioses. Certain of these relationships play a highly important ecological and agronomic role. Arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis (which links a plant to a fungus) thus gives plants a mechanism for improving their supply of water and mineral nutrition.

Scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have discovered how roots find their way past obstacles to grow through soil. The discovery, described in the forthcoming edition of Science, also explains how germinating seedlings penetrate the soil without pushing themselves out as they burrow.

An ability to avoid the plant equivalent of vapor lock and a favorable evolutionary history may explain the unusual drought resistance of junipers, some varieties of which are now spreading rapidly in water-starved regions of the western United States, a Duke University study has found.

China on Tuesday unveiled its national Strategy for Plant Conservation amid efforts to halt the loss of the country's exceptional flora and fauna diversity in the face of its rapid economic growth.

The explosion at a sugar refinery in Georgia earlier this month that killed nine workers underscores the need for tougher industrial safety standards regarding production of combustible dust, according to an article scheduled for the Feb. 25 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.

The residents of Port Hughes on Yorke Peninsula, have begun a fight to stop a desalination plant from being built on the foreshore.