If science is about anything it is about asking questions. But these days it seems that it’s not enough for each individual white-coated, ivory-tower resident to pursue his (or her) own questions. Being a global collaborative effort, we need a unified list of objectives and interrogatives to help focus effort and bring that critical research mass to bear. To that end Prof. Claire Grierson (University of Bristol, UK) and fellow phytointerrogators have just published ‘One hundred important questions facing plant science research’ (New Phytologist 192: 6–12, 2011) in which they present their list of the 100 important questions facing plant science research today. As the team put it, ‘Plant science has never been more important. The growing and increasingly prosperous human population needs abundant safe and nutritious food, shelter, clothes, fibre, and renewable energy, and needs to address the problems generated by climate change, while preserving habitats. These global challenges can only be met in the context of a strong fundamental understanding of plant biology and ecology, and translation of this knowledge into field-based solutions. Plant science is beginning to address these grand challenges, but it is not clear that the full range of challenges facing plant science is known or has been assessed. What questions should the next generation of plant biologists be addressing?’. To view the full list of questions, visit http://www.100plantsciencequestions.org.uk/viewquestions.php. Although this team is firmly UK-based, one suspects that many – all? – of the questions have universal (or, at least, global) relevance. That list now joins the likes of ‘The identification of 100 ecological questions of high policy relevance in the UK’ (Journal of Applied Ecology 43: 617–627, 2006) and the rather less insular ‘One hundred questions of importance to the conservation of global biological diversity’ (Conservation Biology 23: 557–567, 2009) – both sets published by teams fronted by Prof. William Sunderland (University of Cambridge, UK) – and ‘The top 100 questions for global agriculture and food’ (International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 8: 219–236, 2010), produced by a group in which Prof. Sunderland also played a major role. One way to see if ‘100 Bot Qs’ is really taken seriously is to require all future plant science research papers to add a note indicating which of the questions the work addresses. With (ma)Line(d) Managers seeking new ways of judging the worth of researchers, might this also be a useful alternative ‘metric’ by which academics’ career advancement could be judged? Controversial? Maybe, but that’s quite another question…

Whilst physicists try to understand the implications of, and undo any harm done by, the announcement that certain particles can travel faster than the speed of light, others are capitalising upon this phenomenon, to the advantage of plant biology in particular. Already there are reports that a ‘faster-than-light’ microscope is being built. The so-called FLiM will be used to study plant embryos to see if phylogeny really does recapitulate ontogeny, or maybe the other way round. Regardless of the attendant flim-flam, I suspect hackles will rise at that notion. In an even more ambitious project, reasonably intelligent designers are fabricating a device that will travel back in time, and which will allow its passengers to see if evolution really happened. Science fact or science friction? Who knows, but this project is determined to create more light than heat in its execution. The craft – nicknamed (in a competition won by a Mr R. Dawkins [not his real name?] of ‘Oxbridgeshire’) the ‘Dar win-win’ – will also be used to establish once-and-for-all why Photosystem II works first and Photosystem I works second in photosynthesis, and to rule on whether the serial endosymbiotic notion of eukaryotic cell evolution is actually a Hypothesis, a Theory, a Law, or whatever. There are also stories that a rival device is being created that will be crewed by PhDs from the World Health Organisation. The aim of that ship full of Dr WHOs is to identify crop pests and eradicate them before they blight lives, etc (the fact that this may well change the course of history is not something they appear to have considered). That craft – christened the Higgs – will be ready for launch just as soon as they’ve found the final crew member, the hitherto elusive boatswain. Travelling faster than a speeding pullet – to paraphrase Superman’s famous tag line, at least one of these time machines should also be able to answer the age-old conundrum of whether the egg – or the chicken, we’re not ovocentric here! – came first, both ends of the poultry spectrum having previously claimed this primacy (http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/07/14/the-chicken-and-the-egg-ancient-mystery-solved/ and http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/may/26/uknews). Presumably, time(!) will tell if all of this is just another good particle delusion and that physics is actually still OK, or not…. [Each of these so-called time machines is officially a TARDIS – This Article Really Doesn’t Include Science – Ed.]

Most cooking and several desert bananas are interspecific triploid hybrids between Musa acuminata (A genome) and M. balbisiana (B genome). To investigate the possibility of chromosome exchanges between these two species, Jeridi et al. develop a genomic in situ hybridization protocol suitable for analysing meiosis metaphase I from Musa pollen mother cells. They demonstrate that chromosome pairing between M. acuminata and M. balbisiana chromosomes is frequent in triploid interspecific hybrids, results that both provide new insight into cultivar evolution and have important implications for future breeding.

Diphasiastrum species have been assumed to produce homoploid hybrids whose reproductive competence is still a matter of debate. Using flow cytometry, Bennert et al. demonstrate that the three Central European primary hybrids are consistently homoploid. Their nuclear DNA amounts are invariable and intermediate between the parents; no indications for diploid backcrossing are found. Higher DNA amounts occur in three presumably triploid populations, which arose by a secondary hybridization event, probably involving unreduced diplospores formed by a diploid hybrid.

Spatial patterns of plant disease provide important information about pathogen source, spread and reproduction. Using point pattern analysis, Everhart et al. generate detailed three-dimensional maps of different symptom types of brown rot (Monilinia laxa) in sour cherry tree (Prunus cerasus) canopies to characterize symptom aggregation and association. This mapping and analysis framework, which quantitatively supports the importance of twig cankers as an inoculum source within individual trees, should be applicable to many fields of canopy research.

Legume plants enter into symbiotic relationships with soil bacteria in order to obtain nitrogen to sustain plant growth. The nodulation associated with this is regulated in response to both internal developmental signals via the autoregulation of nodulation (AON) and by environmental signals, such as the availability of soil nitrogen. Reid et al. focus on the conservation of key components between AON and the regulation of other plant developmental processes and argue that these similarities will benefit progress in understanding both nodulation and plant development.

At the moment, I am teaching plant hormones in our course on plant cell and developmental biology (BS1003). Fortunately, hormones and development link well with Halloween this year: we have witches, sitting on a broom, with a pumpkin, and for good measure some brightly colored leaves falling around them. Where is the connection?

The broom is a good point to start : many species of trees have “witch’s brooms” on them, structures where a large number of small twigs arise from one region of a branch or the main trunk. The uncontrolled outgrowths are caused by other organisms which either make their own phytohormones which induce the host plant to produce the multiple branches, or by the other organisms altering the plant’s own regulation of hormones.

Insects (including wasps or mites), fungi, viruses or even hemiparasitic plants like mistletoe cause the upset in the balance between the major hormones including auxins and cytokinins so the plant generates new meristems within the stem or trunk which grow out as shoots.

What about the witch herself? The state of being a witch is partly a behavioural anomaly and partly physical, and many of the symptoms including hallucinations, seizures and skin effects are those from ergot poisoning or Saint Anthony’s Fire. Although the symptoms “are not actually caused by bewitchment”, Wikipedia discusses the Medical Explanations of Bewitchment, and ergot poisoning is one widely suggested cause, particularly among the infamous Salem Witches of Massachusetts in the 17th century. The fungus Claviceps purpurea infects the ears of rye plants, and the fungal fruiting body (sclerotium) replaces the seed. This parasitic lifestyle involves taking nutrients from the plant (as though they were going to a seed), and the sclerotium then also takes advantage

of the dispersal mechanism and it is carried around along with the seeds. When the rye is milled for bread, the sclerotium is included and the alkaloids including psychedelic drug relatives and toxins in the ergoline family are eaten, possibly giving rise to witch-like behaviour.

The link of plant hormones and plant development to the pumpkins is slightly more stretched – through sex determination. The first flowers of the ground-spreading vines of many cucurbits are male, and later ones are female or a mixture of male and female. Hormones are responsible for the changing sex of the flowers, but interestingly, one hormone can have a opposite effects in different plants: gibberellin application will change cucurbit flowers to males, while making maize flowers female.

Now, for chromosome biology, all I need is a witch with a tortoiseshell or calico cat, rather than their favoured black cats, so that I can discuss inactivation of the genes on the X chromosome leading to the coat variegation!

This article provides an overview of the development and structure of spore and pollen walls in the major plant groups and summarises progress in our understanding of the molecular genetics underpinning spore/pollen evolution and development.

Plants are daily subjected to myriad biotic and abiotic factors and have to respond appropriately to them or suffer the consequences. However, one factor they’ve probably not been subjected to for much of their evolutionary history is… music. Whether music should be considered abiotic or biotic is a moot point, but an investigation into how vegetation responds to the ‘sound of the harmonic spectrum’ was undertaken when the UK’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra played for an audience – presumably invited – of ‘100 different varieties of plants and bulbs including geraniums, fuschias [sic] and perennials’. Organised by shopping channel QVC the aim was to test the notion that the reverberation of sound waves stimulates protein production in plants and may lead to increased growth. Months on, I’ve not managed to track down the results of this important experiment; can anybody help me? If you’re keen to try the experiment for yourself (or turn it into a student-led project??), a 45-minute album based on the performance, ‘The Floral Seasons: Music to Grow To’, is available to download. [I’d like to make it clear that I have no financial interest in the QVC Channel. In fact I hadn’t heard of it until researching this news item!] This story has some resonance (pun intended…) with an older report that suggests that talking to tomato plants leads them to grow taller. And the voice that seemed to have the greatest response in this regard – and you really couldn’t make it up! – belonged to Sarah Darwin (yep, great-great-granddaughter of the Galapagos gazetteer himself, good old Charles…), who appropriately enough was studying Galapagos Solanum at the time. For more on this fascinating topic, do look at the ‘Probing Question: Does talking to plants help them grow?’ at http://www.physorg.com/news139763645.html.

This week is Open Acess Week, the annual event celebrating the global movement towards Open Access (OA) to research and scholarship.

Here at AoB Blog we try to do our bit to make current research in plant science accessible and interesting to a wide audience, but the Annals of Botany Company goes way beyond that in publishing AoB PLANTS, an online internationally peer reviewed open-access journal publishing high quality papers on all aspects of plant biology – that are free for anyone to read, anywhere in the world. It costs a surprising amount of money to produce a high quality research journal, but Annals of Botany keeps publication charges lower than most similar journals, and we maintain our other reader- and author-friendly policies for all our contributors, including no page charges for authors, authors retaining copyright on all their work, free access to many review articles, increasing amounts of editorial material including ContentSnapshots, Plant Cuttings, and book reviews, wide free distribution of Special Issues of the journal.

So why does any of this matter? Because although developing countries, where the twin threats of climate change and food security are likely to have the greatest adverse effects, spend a disproportionately high amount of money on plant science research, funding is still severely limited. And without access to the best and most recent discoveries in plant science, the future for developing countries looks bleak.

You can afford to worry about medical research once you have enough food to eat.

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