New insights into how phytochromes help plants sense and react to light, temperature
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May 24, 2021 SHARE
Plants contain several types of specialized light-sensitive proteins that measure light by changing shape upon light absorption. Chief among these are the phytochromes.
Phytochromes help plants detect light direction, intensity and duration; the time of day; whether it is the beginning, middle or end of a season; and even the color of light, which is important for avoiding shade from other plants. Remarkably, phytochromes also help plants detect temperature.
New research from Washington University in St. Louis helps explain how the handful of phytochromes found in every plant respond differently to light intensity and temperature, thus enabling land plants to colonize the planet many millions of years ago and allowing them to acclimate to a wide array of terrestrial environments.
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Mysterious News Briefly May 25, 2021
As you sit down for your first maskless picnic since 2019 and give thanks for the food, a special thanks should go to Sudan for the watermelon – researchers at Washington University in St. Louis used DNA to trace the origin of today’s fruit back to that northeast Africa country to the Kordofan melon (
C. lanatus), a melon with a non-bitter whitish pulp. For inventing the game of spitting seeds into a cup 10 feet away, thank your crazy uncle.
In 2019, Swedish maritime archaeologists discovered the wrecks of two 17th-century ships at the bottom of a shipping canal near Vaxholm which they suspected might be the sister ships of the warship Vasa, which sank in 1628 on her first trip out of port, but have now concluded they are actually two younger warships, the Apollo and Maria, that were deliberately sunk at Vaxholm in 1677. They were able to date the wood, since no meatballs survived.