A new study using a NASA satellite instrument orbiting Earth has found that small, environmental changes in polar food webs significantly influence the boom-and-bust, or peak and decline, cycles of phytoplankton. These findings will supply important data for ecosystem management, commercial fisheries and our understanding of the interactions between Earth’s climate and key ocean ecosystems. “It’s really important for us to understand what controls these boom-and-bust cycles, and how they migh...

Never mind the story of Moses parting the Red Sea. How exactly do plants split water? An international team of scientists is getting closer to the answer thanks to unprecedented, atomic-scale images of a protein complex found in plants, algae, and cyanobacteria captured by ultrafast X-ray lasers. The experiments, led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), are helping researchers narrow down the process by which the protein, called photosyste...

A mycorrhiza (Greek: μυκός, mykós, "fungus", and ρίζα, riza, "root", pl. mycorrhizae or mycorrhizas) is a symbiotic association composed of a fungus and roots of a vascular plant. In a mycorrhizal association, the fungus colonizes the host plant's roots, either intracellularly as in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF or AM), or extracellularly as in ectomycorrhizal fungi. They are an important component of soil life and soil chemistry. The association is generally mutualistic, but occasionally we...

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and Seoul National University, South Korea, were able to show for the first time that roots react directly to light which is transmitted from the shoot to the underground parts of Arabidopsis thaliana plants. Roots can thus effectively adapt plant growth to the light conditions in the environment. (Science Signaling, November 2016, DOI: 10.1126/scisignal.aaf6530). Light is not only a source of energ...

Phenotypic plasticity can be defined as the ability of one genotype to produce more than one phenotype when exposed to different environments. Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to change its phenotype in response to changes in the environment. With climate change forcing plant and animal species to adapt, shape-shifters are taking a unique approach that involves changing their physical appearance without having to migrate or evolve in order to cope, new research shows. A ...