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Ecological Values Of Organic Farming
Writing in the March 6 online edition of PNAS, Stanford University graduate student Sasha B. Kramer and her colleagues found that fertilizing apple trees with synthetic chemicals produced more adverse environmental effects than feeding them with organic manure or alfalfa. "The intensification of agricultural production over the past 60 years and the subsequent increase in global nitrogen inputs have resulted in substantial nitrogen pollution and ecological damage," Kramer and her colleagues write. "The primary source of nitrogen pollution comes from nitrogen-based agricultural fertilizers, whose use is forecasted to double or almost triple by 2050." Nitrogen compounds from fertilizer can enter the atmosphere and contribute to global warming, adds Harold A. Mooney, the Paul S. Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology at Stanford and co-author of the study. "Nitrogen compounds also enter our watersheds and have effects quite distant from the fields in which they are applied, as for example in contaminating water tables and causing biological dead zones at the mouths of major rivers," he says. "This study shows that the use of organic versus chemical fertilizers can play a role in reducing these adverse effects."........ Posted by: Erica Permalink Source Delicious Apple Bars
Moist, chewy, all-natural apple bars can be made not only with apples, but also with delicious combinations of apples and other fruits.
The scientists' food-processing procedures enable the bars to stay moist and intensely flavorful without artificial preservatives. Also, the rich flavor means there's no need to add salt or sugar. The bars make a tasty addition to a child's school lunch or a grown-up's afternoon coffee break, as per Tara H. McHugh in the agency's Western Regional Research Center at Albany, Calif. The soft, single-serving bars are made from apple puree that's mixed with apple concentrate and shaped-in a standard piece of food-processing equipment-into neat rectangles. Apple bars are the newest addition to the line of all-natural fruit snacks from McHugh's team, the Processed Foods Research Unit. Gorge Delights of Hood River, Ore., uses crisp, delicious apples from the region's picturesque orchards to make the bars. Great Foods of America, the Cresskill, N.J., marketers for the well-known Earth Balance and Smart Balance brands, markets the bars under the Earth Balance name......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Botanical Feast for the Eye
Four botanical watercolors of William Henry Prestele. Clockwise from top left: "Auburn" apple, "Zengi" persimmon, "Bourgeat" quince and "Tucker" plum.
Images courtesy National Agricultural Library.
The 112-piece exhibition features original watercolors and lithographic prints by Joseph Prestele and sons, plus an array of other items that document the family's work for botanists and horticulturalists of the late 1800s. A catalog of the exhibition is for sale at the NAL. Joseph Prestele (1796-1867), a botanical painter and master lithographer, immigrated to the United States from Bavaria in the 1840s. His sons-Joseph Jr., Gottlieb and William Henry-also became botanical artists. In fact, William Henry Prestele (1838-1895) was the first botanical artist hired by the USDA's Division of Pomology, in 1887. The Prestele family produced botanical illustrations for USDA and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as for the nursery and seed trade. Their watercolors and lithographs are highest-quality scientific illustrations, as well as fine art. The exhibition is the result of an NAL collaboration with the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa. It draws from the collections of both institutions, along with the Smithsonian, and also includes items from the Amana Heritage Society and Prestele descendent Marcelee Konish. Before arriving at the NAL, the exhibition opened at the Hunt Institute in September 2005......... Posted by: Erica Permalink March 2, 2006, 8:20 PM CT Plants + Self-Recognition New data suggest that molecular communication between the plant sexes–specifically the pollen of males and pistils of females–is more complicated than originally thought. Plants, like animals, avoid inbreeding to maximize genetic diversity and the associated chances for survival. Image: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation via US NSF
New data suggest that molecular communication between the plant sexes–specifically the pollen of males and pistils of females–is more complicated than originally thought. Plants, like animals, avoid inbreeding to maximize genetic diversity and the associated chances for survival. Image: Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation via US NSF Source Nature Encourages Diversity in Tropical Forests
"Ecologists have debated for decades whether there is ecological value to species diversity," says Christopher Wills, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, who led the study. "We found that in forests throughout the New and Old World tropics, older trees are more diverse than younger ones. In other words, diversity is actually selected for as each of the forests matures. This means diversity does indeed matter and is an essential property of these complex ecosystems". The study was conducted on seven undisturbed forest plots, or "tropical forest observatories," maintained and studied by research institutions in Borneo, India, Malaysia, Panama, Puerto Rico and Thailand, under the coordination of the Center for Tropical Forest Science of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, based in Panama. "Each forest in our study is a highly dynamic community," says Kyle Harms, a biologist at Louisiana State University (LSU) and a collaborator on the project. "We found that the diversity of each local area increased regardless of the species that were present. This is because trees that were locally common tended to die more often than those that were locally rare, giving a survival advantage to rare species." The effect was even seen within species, he adds. "If a species was common in one part of a plot and rare in another, its death rate was higher where it was common"......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Breakthrough in Plant Stem Cell Research
Image: Two Arabidopsis seedlings. Foreground: a wild type seedling with functional meristem. Behind: a seedling with a WUSCHEL gene mutation which makes it unable to develop any organs beyond cotyledons, the leaves in the embryo of a seed. Background: a detailed section of a microarray hybridization.
Image credit: Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology
All above ground parts of a plant - leaves, stem, flowers, and seeds - ultimately are derived from cells of a small tissue at the tip of the shoot. Biologists call this tissue the "apical meristem", and it contains totipotent stem cells that are active throughout the life of the plant. Unlike the stem cells of animals, which can only produce specific kinds of tissue after the animal is past its embryonic stage, plant stem cells remain their totipotency and, therefore plants can continue growing over a number of years, developing new organs......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Source Growing Better Nursery Plants
Analyzing the size and speed of water droplets produced by a new nozzle designed to treat densely planted nursery crops
The system is the brainchild of a team assembled over the past three years by Charles Krause, research leader and plant pathologist in the ARS Application Technology Research Unit at Wooster. ARS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's principal scientific research agency. Eventhough the lessons learned in the research are still experimental, they're already being adopted so rapidly by nursery operators that some in the industry expect the ARS monitoring system to be commercialized within the next few years. Nursery managers have reduced water use by 40 percent or more by applying these lessons. The system monitors plant needs year-round, currently using 30 sensors for each of three sets of 50 trees. Tests are being done at Willoway Nurseries in Avon, Ohio, on Red Sunset maple, redbud, and Chanticleer pear trees. The sensors and a weather station linked to computer data loggers take readings-every minute, 24 hours a day, during the growing season-of measurements such as soil temperature and moisture......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Source Bacterium With Magnetic Personality
Magnetotactic bacteria contain chains of magnetic iron minerals that allow them to orient in the Earth's magnetic field, like living compass needles. These bacteria have long been observed to respond to high oxygen levels in the lab by swimming toward geomagnetic north in the Northern Hemisphere and geomagnetic south in the Southern Hemisphere. But now scientists from MIT, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Iowa State University have found a bacterium in New England that does just the opposite: a Northern Hemisphere creature that swims south. Because this behavior doesn't make sense in the natural environment of the bacteria, where swimming south would take them away from areas with their preferred oxygen level, the scientists believe there must be other explanations for why some magnetotactic bacteria swim in particular directions. The team dubbed the bacterium the barbell for its appearance. In a study published in the Jan. 20 issue of Science, they describe how they used genetic sequencing and other laboratory techniques to identify the barbell, which was found coexisting with other previously described magnetotactic bacteria in Salt Pond on Cape Cod......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Source Plant Smells And Humans
Moreover, humans have used plant volatiles since antiquity in the production of perfumes, in medicines, and as spices that serve dual roles of flavoring agent and food preservative. Plants reported to have antimicrobial activity include chilies, clove, garlic, mustard, sage, rosemary and thyme. As per articles in the Feb. 10 issue of the journal Science, which has devoted a special section to the topic, despite the importance of volatiles in a range of human affairs, until recently little was known about how plants make the smelly substances, which has limited the ability to make them in the laboratory or understand their roles in plant life. Improvements in analytical tools, though, such as gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, mapping metabolic pathways, and genomics, have led to new knowledge about how the compounds are synthesized and appreciation for the complex strategies plants have evolved to survive and reproduce in a diverse array of habitats......... Posted by: Erica Permalink New Pathway Into Plant Cells
The researchers have identified for the first time a protein that can cross plant cell membranes, where it functions as a toxin to kill the cell. It had been known that viruses and bacteria can penetrate cell wall barriers and disrupt plant cells, but never before has a protein been found that could do this by itself. When more research is done, this may provide a new tool to penetrate plant cells and possibly manipulate their behavior in some beneficial way - to grow faster, resist disease or increase yields. The findings were published recently in two articles in The Plant Cell, a professional journal. Also of considerable interest is that the biological mechanism discovered here bears striking similarity to the way proteins can function in mammalian cells - researchers say they may have found a characteristic that has been preserved for more than 600 million years, when plants and animals diverged from a common ancestor on their separate evolutionary paths. "This is a doorway into plant cells that we never knew existed," said Lynda Ciuffetti, an OSU professor of botany and plant pathology. "Viruses and bacteria have been known to bring proteins into cells, but this is just a protein by itself crossing the cell wall barrier without disrupting its integrity. This is a significant fundamental advance in our understanding of plant biology"......... Posted by: Erica Permalink Read more.... |
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