Botany 2015 - Tuesday

The fatigue of almost non-stop meetings and talks is beginning to set in. From the street level, the meetings are taking place on three lower levels. There are 130 steps from the top to the bottom, and only the up escalator is working. Everyone is getting a workout. Let's see what has been learned?
A tremendous diversity of herbaceous sphenophyllophytes existed in the Permian; those would be horsetails and their close relatives. Pollen tube growth is not related to flower size in waterlilies, in fact they grow slower in the huge Victoria waterlilies. A lot of creative ways exist for small collections to relate to people and if you want such information you can find it at small collections network.  It's still OK to call yourself a morphologist, which is good because TPP are one. A lot of nasty plants are terribly invasive and rather hard to control. Botanists can take a long time to decide how to spend very small amounts of money. Botanists in general are really nice to students who come to these meetings. Such a small sampling. Oh, and TPP discovered a lovely new sandwich: a toasted brie with red onions and blueberries sandwich. Seriously good stuff.

Highlights of recent botanical research

For those of you who are not research botanists, i.e., most of you, here's a link to some editor-selected articles from the latest issue of the American Journal of Botany.  One of the things that botanists don't do is talk about their research enough in terms accessible to non-specialists, and these highlights are an attempt to describe these brand new scientific publications of botanical research in more general language than used when professional botanists communicate with each other.  TPP hopes you like seeing how diverse the field of botany is, how many different ideas and topics are being researched, and all the different places this research is being done.  TPP would also like to point out that ~41% of the authors are women (as best this author could determine from the names) demonstrating that the field of botany has a high proportion of females, one of the highest if not the highest in all of the sciences.  The diverse authorship also shows you how collaborative and international science has become, especially botany.  Bonus: here's the link to the cover picture of this issue and its legend.  Our general term for such organisms was scaly, (and bristly), green monads (single-celled organisms with scales for a cell wall). Heterokont refers to having two unlike flagella and this trait helps define a large, diverse lineage of organisms (some might call it a kingdom) that includes the brown algae (kelps and rockweeds among others) and this synurophyte.