Researchers recently investigated the evolution of grasses, one of the most economic and ecologically important plant families, by sequencing the chloroplast DNA of an early diverging grass genus, ...

For more than a billion years, plants have had an internal dialogue, and we are just beginning to learn the words. The unusual conversation occurs between two compartments within plant cells—the ...

The impacts of the prokaryotic ancestry of chloroplasts extend to the occurrence of a bacterial ‘alarm’ hormone, or alarmone, in plants, which is triggered by nutrient deficiency or stress. A new ...

The chloroplast carries out photosynthesis in all multicellular plants and algae. A new study sheds light on the evolutionary origins of this organelle, potentially answering the question: what is the ...

Guillaume E. Martin, Mathieu Rousseau-Gueutin, Solenn Cordonnier, Oscar Lima, Sophie Michon-Coudouel, Delphine Naquin, Julie Ferreira de Carvalho, Malika Aïnouche ...

All life on earth ultimately relies on energy from the sun, and photosynthesis is the vital link. Photosynthesis generates adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is the universal molecular fuel in living ...

Plant Physiology, Vol. 136, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 4048-4060 (13 pages) p-Hydroxybenzoic acid (pHBA) is the major monomer in liquid crystal polymers. In this study, the Escherichia coli ubiC gene ...

Plants of different species can swap chloroplasts, the little cellular factories that capture energy from sunlight, when stems graft together. The surprising discovery may explain why evolutionary ...

Studying sea slugs in the group Sacoglossa can mean being on the receiving end of some very imaginative emails. Sidney K. Pierce, of the University of South Florida, retired a few years ago. “But to ...

Scientists from the University of Tokyo have successfully engineered animal cells capable of photosynthesis. The team used chloroplasts from schyzon, a species that thrives in volcanic hot springs, ...