Nowdays, humans are producing ever greater amounts of plastic – much of which ends up as garbage. What’s more, because plastic does not break down in the same way as other organic materials, it can persist in the environment over extremely long periods of time. Scientists have recently identified a fungus which could help deal with our waste problem by using enzymes to rapidly break down plas...
The late Miocene is a sub-epoch when hominoids became rare worldwide but managed to survive in a few refugia. Investigating the living conditions of the late Miocene hominoids is therefore crucial for a better understanding of how they survived in those refugia.
The historical biogeography of the Northern Hemisphere has attracted the attention of botanists and biogeographers. A striking feature of the geographical distribution of plants in this hemisphere is the existence of closely related taxa that are disjunctly distributed in eastern Asia, Europe, and North America.
Many plant species or genera living in the temperate forests of East Asia now have fragmented distributions closely linked to past climate oscillation. Repeated forest fragmentation can not only lead to allopatric divergence of species, but also give rise to speciation. Many biological factors, such as hybridization and polyploidization are also considered playan important role in these speciat...
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), from the phylum of Glomeromycotais, is the most common mycorrhizal association between soil fungi and terrestrial plants, with about 75% of plants forming mycorrhizal symbioses with AMF.
Economically, Leguminosae is second in importance only to Poaceae. Legumes are the most valuable plant protein sources in human diet, and even the only protein sources in some poor regions of the world.
The communesins share an identical synthetically challenging heptacyclic core arrayed with two aminal groups and at least five stereogenic centers, including two vicinal quaternary carbons. This combination of intriguing structural complexity and interesting biological activities renders these alkaloids popular synthetic targets.
Phylogenomics applies genomic data to reconstruct the evolutionary history of organisms and has been applied to tackle rapidly radiating clades and hybridization events in diverse lineages.
The evolutionary pathway from outcrossing to high levels of self-fertilization has been followed in numerous taxa of herbaceous flowering plants.
