Botanist

The increasing use of plant evidence in forensic investigations gave rise to a powerful new discipline - Forensic Botany - that analyses micro- or macroscopic plant materials, such as the totality or fragments of an organ (i.e., leaves, stems, seeds, fruits, roots) and tissue (i.e., pollen grains, spores, fibers, cork) or its chemical composition (i. e., secondary metabolites, isotopes, DNA, starch grains). Forensic botanists frequently use microscopy, chemical analysis, and botanical expertise to identify and interpret evidence crucial to solving civil and criminal issues, collaborating in enforcing laws or regulations, and ensuring public health safeguards...

Progressive changes in the environment are related to modifications of the habitat. Introducing exotic species, and interbreeding between species can lead to processes that in the case of rare species or small populations threatens their integrity. Given the declining trends of many populations due to increased hybridization, early recognition of hybrids becomes important in conservation management. Natural hybridization is prevalent in Jacobaea . There are many naturally occurring interspecific hybrids in this genus, including those between Jacobaea vulgaris and its relatives...

Iron is an essential element for most organisms. Both plants and microorganisms have developed different mechanisms for iron uptake, transport and storage. In the symbiosis systems, such as rhizobia-legume symbiosis and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis, maintaining iron homeostasis to meet the requirements for the interaction between the host plants and the symbiotic microbes is a new challenge. This intriguing topic has drawn the attention of many botanists and microbiologists, and many discoveries have been achieved so far...

Medieval European medicine relied on monasteries where ancient medical works were transcribed. Trade routes to the East and the influence of Arab medicine, which supplemented the knowledge of Greco-Roman physicians, enabled the foundation and development of the Salerno Medical School, whose most famous work is Flos medicinae: Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum. This medical textbook, written in verse and drawn up on the basis of ancient sources and empirical experiences of Salerno physicians, contains rules on how to preserve health, on diseases and the use of medicinal plants for medicinal purposes...

INTRODUCTION: Exposure to potentially toxic plants is a global problem, resulting in thousands of calls to poison centers and emergency department visits annually and occasional deaths. Persons with limited botanical knowledge may be tempted to rely on smartphone applications to determine if plants are safe to forage. This study evaluated the reliability of several popular smartphone applications to identify foraged foods and distinguish them from potentially toxic plants in the Midwestern United States...

Mobile-captured images of medicinal plants are widely used in various research investigations. Machine vision-based tasks such as the identification of plant species types for intelligent imaging device applications take a significant part in it. Botanists, farmers and researchers can reliably identify medicinal plants with the help of images captured using smartphones.  Mobile captured images can be used for quality control to make sure that the right plant species are being used in pharmaceutical products...

This dataset contains temperature variations observed on a building terrace that is partially covered with plantations on one side while the other side remains exposed. The study was conducted at a shelter named "Anbagham" in Tamil Nadu, India. Two sets of temperature and humidity sensors were utilized, with one set placed on the external roofs and the other set placed inside the rooms corresponding to these roofs. The analysis spanned over a period of two months, specifically during the hottest period of the year, totaling 66 days, with measurements taken every hour...

Coordinated cell proliferation and differentiation result in the complex structure of the inflorescence in wheat. It exhibits unique differentiation patterns and structural changes at different stages, which have attracted the attention of botanists studying the dynamic regulation of its genes. Our research aims to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of spike development genes at different growth stages. We conducted RNA-Seq and qRT-PCR evaluations on spikes at three stages. Our findings revealed that genes associated with the cell wall and carbohydrate metabolism showed high expression levels between any two stages throughout the entire process, suggesting their regulatory role in early spike development...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Taxonomists are primary actors of biodiversity assessment. At the same time, there is awareness by the taxonomic community at large that the field is going through a crisis, sometimes referred to as the "taxonomic impediment". Coupled with the ongoing biodiversity crisis, or 6 th mass extinction, this biodiversity impedance puts at risk the target set in the Convention on Biological Diversity's Global Biodiversity Framework vision 2050, which calls for urgent action to "…put biodiversity on a path to recovery by 2030 for the benefit of planet and people"...

Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) holders have deep ecological, horticultural, and practical knowledge of plants, but this knowledge is not routinely considered and supported along with seed collections conserved ex situ. In this opinion, conceived collaboratively by a team of botanists, ecologists, ethnobiologists, and practitioners in biodiversity and ILK systems conservation, we propose seven actions towards the co-conservation of seeds and associated knowledge to overcome obstacles and encourage ex situ conservation institutions to support knowledge holders in multiple ways...

BACKGROUND: Pseudanthia or 'false flowers' are multiflowered units that resemble solitary flowers in form and function. Over the last century the term 'pseudanthium' has been applied to a wide array of morphologically divergent blossoms, ranging from those with easily noticeable florets to derived, reduced units in which individual flowers become almost indistinguishable. And although initially admired mostly by botanists, the diversity and widespread distribution of pseudanthia across angiosperms has already made them a fascinating topic for evolutionary and developmental comparative studies...

Over centuries of plant morphological research, biologists have enthusiastically explored how distinct vascular arrangements have diversified. These investigations have focused on the evolution of steles and secondary growth and examined the diversity of vascular tissues (xylem and phloem), including atypical developmental pathways generated through modifications to the typical development of ancestral ontogenies. A shared vernacular has evolved for communicating on the diversity of alternative ontogenies in seed plants...

While interest in early modern herbaria has so far mainly concentrated on the dried plants stored in them, this paper addresses another of their qualities - their role as manuscripts. In the 1670s, the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646-95) spent several years in Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) as a medical officer in the service of the Dutch East India Company. During his stay he put together four herbaria, two of which contain a wealth of handwritten notes by himself and several later owners. First, it will be shown that these notes provide information on the linguistic skills and interests of those who collected plants in an overseas trading settlement...

In the Covid-19 pandemic situation, the world is looking for immunity-boosting techniques for fighting against coronavirus. Every plant is medicine in one or another way, but Ayurveda explains the uses of plant-based medicines and immunity boosters for specific requirements of the human body. To help Ayurveda, botanists are trying to identify more species of medicinal immunity-boosting plants by evaluating the characteristics of the leaf. For a normal person, detecting immunity-boosting plants is a difficult task...

Macrolobium paulobocae is presented as a new species of the legume subfamily Detarioideae. It is restricted to seasonally flooded igapó forests in the Central Amazon. We provide a description, illustration, photographs, and a distribution map of the new species, as well as a table of comparative morphology with similar, likely phylogenetically related species. The epithet is in honor of Paulo Apóstolo Costa Lima Assunção, or Paulo Boca, a great Amazonian botanist, victim of COVID-19 in January 2021...

Plant sex is complicated. Compared to more familiar animals, including ourselves, plants reproduce so differently and with such bewildering variation, that botanists spent centuries debating whether plants sexually reproduce at all. Camerarius' (1694) revolutionary concept that plants may be "male," "female," and "hermaphrodite" anticipated the modern evolutionary hypothesis that sex, as defined by meiosis and fertilization, is shared by all eukaryotes. Yet, the word "gender," which botanists often use to describe plant reproductive systems, has a confused history within the field, isolated from a broader scholarly discussion that has profoundly influenced culture...

The mystery of the morphogenesis of phyllotaxis has been of concern for several generations of botanists and mathematicians. Of particular interest is the fact that the number of visible spirals is equal to the number from the Fibonacci series. The article proposes an analytical solution to two fundamental questions of phyllotaxis: what is the morphogenesis of patterns of spiral phyllotaxis? and why the number of visible spirals is equal to number from the Fibonacci series? The article contains videos illustrating the recursive dynamic model of spiral phyllotaxis morphogenesis...

A reporter recounts the tale of a daring expedition that yielded vital insights about the Grand Canyon's flora.

South Asia, which is composed of eight countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, is an important global biodiversity hotspot. As a part of the Mapping Asia Plants (MAP) project, we reviewed the history of botanical investigations, floristic works, and publications in this region, as well as the key floras, checklists, and online databases in South Asia. The botanical survey of this region, which began during the 17th century, has two distinct phases: surveys conducted during the British India period and those conducted in the post-British period...

Leaves of the majority of plants contain calcium oxalate (CaOx) crystals or druses which often occur in spectacular distribution patterns. Numerous studies on CaOx in plant tissues across many different plant groups have been published, since it can be visualized readily under a light microscope (LM). However, there is surprisingly limited knowledge on the actual, precise distribution of CaOx in the leaves of quite ordinary plants such as common native and exotic trees. Traditional sample preparation for the documentation of the distribution of CaOx crystals in a given sample - including overall distribution - requires time-consuming clearing procedures...