Loopy Leaf Research

The Phactor has spent a lot of time looking at the patterns veins, vascular bundles, make in leaves. The earliest leafy organs of land lacked vascular tissue completely. The earliest land plants were leafless. Then the clubmosses developed leaves with a single vascular bundle down the middle, which limited the width of the blade to the distance water could diffuse from cell to cell. The ancestors of ferns and seed plants developed leaves from modified branches and the venation, the pattern of vascular bundles formed a spreading dichotomy as each bundle branched and branched again right out to the edge of the leaf allowing for a broad leaf, but such veins are not interconnected like the leaves of flowering plants. Ginkgo, a lot of ferns, and cycads have open dichotomous venation still. But the flowering plants have a wholly different pattern, one of looping interconnected veins, so what is their advantage? The answer makes sense; if a vein gets damaged, a looping interconnected network allows materials to be conducted around the obstruction. The leaf shown here shows how translocation continues around the the leaf even after the midvein is injured (dark green dot). Now if only interstate engineers could figure out something similar. Actually some of that pattern does remind me of the Dan Ryan what with obstructions and then suddenly losing a lane! Scary.

Indiana Jones of Ginger

Just a couple of blogs ago, an article featured a long-time botanical friend of mine from the New York Botanical Garden, now here's a broadcast featuring John Kress, Curator of Botany at the Smithsonian, as the "Indiana Jones of Ginger". Man, the Phactor needs a better PR person because no way my old buddy John wears a fedora anywhere near as well as the Phactor. But John has spent a career studying the ginger family and its close relatives, and they are a fascinating group of plants. Here's the "weeping goldsmith", not a flower but an inflorescence, that John is talking about, and he's written a book of the same name about his field research in Myanmar. Dang, the Phactor also has to finish his book because if it's published posthumously you don't get as many interviews.

Really really green animals

This demonstrates what happens when you try to catch up on your science reading; you discover all the neat things that scientists have figured out recently, and this is really the neatest thing about being part of science, there are always new things to learn, figure out, and understand. The previous blog mentioned green sea slugs, a organism introduced to me decades ago by a former colleague who went West. Sea slugs eat algae, harvest the chloroplasts and keep them in body cavities where they continue to photosynthesize providing food to the slug. Now it turns out this symbiosis has been going on so long the slug has acquired enough of the chloroplast genes that it can synthesize chlorophyll! Apparently this replenishes the chlorophyll in the captured chloroplasts so that they can function longer. While chloroplasts used to be independent organisms, they long ago lost some genes to the host cell nucleus that were necessary for synthesizing chlorophyll, which makes the symbiosis permanent, except for green sea slugs. Evolution is pretty nifty because biological weirdness makes no sense otherwise. The other thing to note is that green sea slugs actually look sort of leaf-like, now they almost are; they just need a bit of cellulose.

Really green animals

Generally organisms are green for one of two reasons: they use chlorophyll for photosynthesis, what the Phactor calls "really green", or they have a green-pigmented camouflage, which produces a pretty clear dichotomy between plants and animals. Down deep in the animal clade where you begin to get close to the never never land of unicellular organisms where distinctions like plant and animal do not work, you find some exceptions: green hydra, green clams, green sea slugs, green corals, and all of these harbor symbiotic algae in their bodies, but not in their cells. So of course once you get used to making such pronoucements, an exception pops up and forces you to go find the bloody thing in your book manuscript and add a dinged dang endnote! Algae are known to live within amphibian eggs in the "gell" surrounding the embryo, which might be considered intracellular, but maybe the Phactor misremembers something about amphibian eggs. The algal cells take up nitrogenous waste and get a nice wet habitat. But now the algal cells have been found inside a salamander embryo itself, the first truly cholophyll green vertebrate, although still lacking vertebrae at that stage of development. Does the embryo gain some benefit from the algal symbiont in addition to the removal of nitrogenous wastes? Does the algae share its photosyntetic products with the salamander? Maybe this will get those darned vertebrate physiologists to learn something about photosynthesis.

Fall Color - Winterberry

Most fall color comes from foliage, but a few plants produce colorful displays of fruit. Sometime back the Phactor featured the azure beauty berry, a terrific shade-loving, low care shrub. Another shrub that does well in the difficult continental climate of Lincolnland is winterberry, a deciduous holly (Ilex verticilliata), and since it drops its leaves, the display of bright scarlet fruits is all the more dramatic. Like all hollies, winter berry is also dioecious (di – two, oecious–housed), so you have to plant one pollen producer for every several female shrubs if you want fruit. And of course, the birds love such fruits, so expect your attractive display to disappear by way of helping them along on their migrations.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Japanese Anemone

Another late fall bloomer, the Japanese Anemone (Anemone x hybrida 'Prince Henry') is still hanging on in the garden because there hasn't been enough of a frost to damage it yet. Anemones are another member of the Buttercup family, which favors either spring or fall flowering and all seem quite tolerant of cold. Like many other members of the family, there is only a single perianth whorl of many petalloid sepals, or for those of us who shy away from commitment, tepals, surrounging many stamens and a domed receptacle bearing many pistils. Yes, that should just scream, "I'm a member of the Ranunculaceae to all students of plant taxonomy." The name anemone comes from the Greek root for wind, and thus their common name windflower, but this gets confused with Pulsatilla, which uses the same common name. In both genera as well as Clematis, each pistil becomes an achene and each bears a persistent style that becomes a fluffy appendage to aid in wind dispersal. So either the radiating perianth or the "writhing" mass of styles were thought similar to the radiating arms of the sea anemone because why else name a sessile marine animal after the wind?

Out of your gourd!

Fruits can best be defined as flowers at the stage of seed dispersal, and they all function to both protect and/or disperse seeds, more of one and less of the other depending upon the specific type of fruit. One of the ways in which humans have changed domesticated plants has been to select for bigger fruits. Natural selection would prevent plants from putting excess energy into rewarding fruits because of diminishing returns meaning that more fruit flesh would not disperse more seeds further, but since they are domestic and depending upon human intervention to reproduce, such wasted energy from the plant perspective is just what we want. And this is the time of year when human efforts to increase the size of fruits become very evident because pumpkins/squash, which are basically the same thing, have been selected to produce the largest fruits of all. This picture shows the Phactor admiring a 901 pound beast on display last year at the Great Pumpkin Patch in Arthur here in Lincolnland. But the all time grand champion was grown pumpkin, grown this year and on display at the New York Botanical Garden, is over twice as big at 1800+ pounds. The biggest one the Phactor has ever grown was a mere 150 lbs, and it was quite impressive; this year even zucchini didn’t grow well! Such huge pepos, the type of fruit, become flattened and deformed under their own weight, and naturally, well, naturally to an inquiring botanical mind, someone had to figure out how they managed not to simply burst open when they got so big. But why didn't they figure out how many pies this beast would make?

Plant Respiration Question

Dear Phytophactor,
My fiance and i have recently gotten into a debate about plant respiration.
She is worried about the amount of CO2 that plants may be giving off at night and prefers that we do not have them in the bedroom where we sleep.
I love plants....but i love her more.
So, the question is, what is the ratio of O2 to CO2 that plants give off? How much CO2 can a single medium size house plant give off in one night? How much CO2 is being produced if I have a bedroom full of plants? (five or six)?
I have searched the internet, and many sites agree that plants give off CO2 at night when they are in the process of respiration, but no one seems to provide any information about the exact amount of CO2 that plants actually produce.
Thank you!
Matthew

The Phytophactor responds:
Dear Matthew,
You make the Phactor feel like the Car Talk guys when you send me a question like this. The basic idea is correct; plants respire and give off CO2, all the time, and at night the respiration is not off set by photosynthesis, but here's the critical thing to understand. Plants respire at a much, much lower rate than a nice warm-blooded mammal. So if your fiance is worried about oxygen depletion and CO2 buildup at night, guess who ends up in another bedroom? Alternatively you could keep your bedroom really cool at night which will slow down plant respiration even more, while at the same time providing a good reason for keeping your warm carbon dioxide producing body around. Since your plants do grow, your plants are capturing more CO2 during the day than they release via respiration all day. The two cats sleeping on my bed respire a lot more than a whole roomful of plants. So plant respiration just isn't a problem, and here the Phactor stops short of saying a silly concern although it is, but I did hear this concern once with respect to giving plants to hospital patients. Even if plants gushed carbon dioxide at night hospital rooms and your bedroom are not sealed boxes, so gases can easily diffuse to equilibrate any tiny differences that might occur. So sleep well, the plants and their respiration aren't a problem; if they were we'd have be careful about entering my greenhouse or the rainforest at night, and both of them have far greater mass of plants respiring than your bedroom. Hope this helps you sleep in restful assurance, providing you do not handle being on the winning side of this debate with a certain air of superiority and condescension (And depending upon the particular nature of your fiance, please recall the scene in the 1st Star Wars movie where the R2D2 is beating Chewbacca at a chess-like game. Let the Wookie win may be very good pre-maritaladvice.).

A truffle trifle?

This is another one of those news reports that leaves me wondering about science reporting, and the use of PR to make your research seem more important. The truffle is an Ascomycete fungus and their sexual reproduction has long been known. Ascomycetes like this have mating types, so think + or -and it takes two mycelia (the filamentous “plant” body) to mate, one of each mating type. The result of such a fusion does not result in a diploid nucleus, but a dikaryon cell with two nuclei, one + and one -, and together with the + and – mycelia, they produce a fruiting structure, in this case the divine ascocarp called a truffle. So why is this worthy of news; it's been known for decades? Maybe it wasn’t known that each oak tree harbored only one individual mycelium of a single mating type and that’s why sexual reproduction is a bit rare, requiring a bit of “outreach” to find a mate. In case you did not know truffles are a symbiotic fungus that grow in association with oak tree roots, and the fruiting bodies are inconveniently produced under ground. Pigs have long been used to sniff them out, but then you have to hold the beast back and fight them for the prize; now dogs are more commonly used because they can smell truffles but don’t want to eat them. Basidiomycetes like your common grocery store mushroom persist in the dikaryon condition, although that takes some interesting gymnastics during cell division to maintain two and exactly two nuclei, one of each type, and therefore these dikaryon fungi are relatively easy to culture.

Herbal Remedies and Supplements – Do you get what you pay for?

A great many of alternative, complementary, integrative, holistic, homeopathic, or naturopathic remedies or health products involve herbs. Herb has three distinctly different definitions: (1) any non-woody plant, (2) a savory seed or leaf mostly of Mediterranean origin (many are members of the mint or parsley families), (3) the guy who wears a Cubs hat and mows your lawn. Adherents of herbal remedies rely upon folk lore, personal experience, and testimonials from others’ personal experiences as evidence of efficaciousness, all of which are confounded by the placebo effect and other uncontrolled variables (dosage, plant material, storage, etc.). When these are taken into account, many popular herbal remedies, e.g., Echinacea, fail to provide any more benefit than a placebo.
But at a more basic level, when you buy some herbal health products, what are you getting? When you buy a bottle labeled GINKGO BILOBA, you have this crazy idea that ginkgo is what is inside, but maybe not. The Phactor has been asked to identify crumbled up, dried, green, plant material on more than one occasion, and quite frankly from an anatomical perspective, you cannot find out too much. New molecular methods can provide an alternative via DNA fingerprints that look at characteristic components of the genome as a means of determining if a particular plant is present or not. Unfortunately while such testing is positive when something is absent, you still may not have a positive identification unless the DNA fingerprint profile matches another plant you have a profile for.
So how’s it going out there in herbal health supplement land? Not well, if the DNA fingerprint testing conducted at the New York Botanical Garden is any indication of the quality of herbal health products. Many herbal teas are so diluted by a cheaper/tastier filler that an effective dosage seems unlikely, so you certainly are not getting very much of what you are paying for. Only one in 4 samples that were supposed to have ginkgo had the DNA fingerprint of ginkgo, and since ginkgo is an extremely common tree in cultivation and extremely easy to identify, even for amateurs, its absence from herbal supplements must be considered deliberate. Or maybe they just forgot. Although the testing is still dealing with smallish sample sizes, if the materials tested are representative at all, then the vast majority of the herbal supplement industry would seem to be a fraud on more than one level. Lastly the botanist in this interview, Dennis Stevenson, is one of my long-time professional friends.