The University of Navarra has installed a thermal gradient greenhouse in order to study the impact of climate change on plants. This is a pioneering methodology for studying the simultaneous effect of increased CO2 and ambient temperature.

Scientists have made an important advance in understanding the genetic processes that give flowers, leaves and plants their bright colours. The knowledge could lead to a range of benefits, including better understanding of the cancer-fighting properties of plant pigments and new, natural food colourings.

Recent research from Vidi researcher Josef Stuefer at the Radboud University Nijmegen reveals that plants have their own chat systems that they can use to warn each other.

Using a novel “deep sequencing” technology that can in one fell swoop decode 50 million sequences representing well over a billion bases of DNA, a research team led by University of Delaware scientists is working to unmask where, why and how certain genes are switched on or off in rice--a crop vital to the world's food supply.

Inquiring Texas research minds want to know more about cotton fleahoppers - a tiny, sometimes obscure pest that can damage plants during their early growth.

Epistatic interactions between genes are a major factor in evolution. Hybrid necrosis is an example of a deleterious phenotype caused by epistatic interactions that is observed in many intra- and interspecific plant hybrids.

Biologists at Harvard University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests orchids are old enough to have co-existed with dinosaurs.

Botanists at Oregon State University have discovered that a single plant gene can cause resistance to one disease at the same time it produces susceptibility to a different disease – the first time this unusual phenomenon has ever been observed in plants.

Twenty-two years of dedicated research has finally resulted in success: In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a British team headed by Steven V. Ley at the University of Cambridge reports the first synthesis of azadirachtin, a natural compound that stops predatory insects from feeding.

Scientists are reporting an advance toward turning corn plants into natural factories for producing gelatin to replace animal-sourced gelatin widely used by the pharmaceutical industry for manufacturing capsules and tablets.

Researchers have developed a breed of American chestnut that is resistant to the fungal blight that decimated its population in the early 1900s.

Jeffrey Dean, professor of forest biotechnology in the University of Georgia Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, is spearheading a project at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI) that will greatly expand the gene catalog for pines and initiate the first gene discovery efforts in five other conifer families.