The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau lies in the heart of Asia and a steady stream of its glacier melt injects into the top ten rivers in Asia. The effects of climate change exceed the global average. Research found that the higher the more obvious the temperature elevation is. A paper by researcher XU Jianchu, published in Conservation Biology, fully revealed the far-reaching implications of climate warm...
Paphiopedilum and Cypripedium are close relatives belonging to the subfamily Cypripedioideae. However, they undergo considerable divergence in the aspects of leaf traits and habitats. The former has thick, evergreen leaves and usually lives in the deep shade of tropic or sub-tropic forests. In south-west China, they mainly grow in the detritus of the cracks and shallow hollows of the eroded roc...
The De'ang people, an old indigenous minority in China, mainly live in the Southwest of Yunan Province. They have accumulated abundant traditional knowledge about utilization of medicinal plants in their long-time live and produce. Supporting financially from the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the research group of Prof. LONG Chunlin in Kunming Institute of Bot...
Nectar robbers are floral visitors who absorb plant nectar by means of piercing holes or biting flowers. The impacts of robbers on plant reproduction generally include both direct and indirect influences. The direct effects will occur when robbers act as pollinators (i.e. robber-like pollinators) or damage floral reproductive structures, whereas the indirect effects are, to most extents, subjec...
Conquering complex natural products by total synthesis has always been a symbol of the advancement of organic chemistry. Total synthesis of challenging and complex natural products is also recognized as one of the toughest fields in the physical science. At present, Chinese chemists still lag far behind many of competitors from other developed countries in total synthesis of natural produc...
At present, natural product chemistry study has confronted with predicament, that is, the stereochemistry research. The three-dimensional structure of some compounds can not be effectively identified due to small quantity obtained in experiments, complex structure or other reasons. At the same time, it is found that biogenetic route for new compounds, which also became hot concerns of organic ...
Bambusoideae which encompasses approximately 1000 species around the world is the only subfamily that contains woody members in the grass family, Poaceae. Temperate woody bamboos are highly diverse in East Asia with varied habits and complex morphological features and are notorious for being taxonomically difficult and having a complicated taxonomy. As next-generation sequencing techniques have...
More and more research showed that plant secondary metabolites have a variety of ecological functions such as defense, attraction, signaling and UV protection. Researchers LI Shenghong and his colleagues, under the support of starting funding for talent introduction of Kunming Institute of Botany, the independent projects of State Key Laboratory and National Natural Science Foundation, establis...
Tuber F. H. Wigg. produce subterranean ascomata known as truffles in commercial market andis of great ecological importance and scientific value. Some of them are very popular edible mushrooms and called “black diamond” or “food of God” for their special flavor and high price. In recent years, by the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Natural Science Foundation...
