Without plants on land, humans could not live on Earth. From mosses to ferns to grasses to trees, plants are our food, fodder and timber. All this diversity emerged from an algal ancestor that ...

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the earliest trees and how, as species disappear over time, new trees can evolve even from species better known as house plants or vegetables.

Researchers have discovered that plants benefit from a greater variety of interactions with pollinators and herbivores. Plants that are pollinated by insects and have to defend themselves against ...

Divergent evolution leads to variation among populations and thus promotes diversification. In plants, adaptation to different soils, pollinator guilds, and herbivores is thought to be a key ...

The plant-parasitic nematodes are considered as one of the most destructive pests, from which the migratory and sedentary endoparasitic plant parasitic nematodes infect more than 4000 plant species ...

A moss gene previously thought to have been inactive actually plays a key role in its evolutionary success, researchers from ...

A deep genetic mystery has baffled plant scientists for decades. Although leaves, stems, and flowers develop in strikingly similar ways across many plant species, scientists have struggled to identify ...

In the summer of 2011, paleontologist and science writer Riley Black was on a mission. Walking through the Montana desert, she was on the lookout for a Tyrannosaurus rex. But that day, she wasn’t ...

Directed evolution is a laboratory technique that mimics natural selection and allows scientists to evolve genes and the proteins they encode. Traditionally, this technique has been used in microbes, ...

Tucked away in Perdana Botanical Gardens, a little-known herbarium preserves thousands of specimens as a repository for ...

The most unexpected finding was the presence of mycorrhizal fungi, which are known to depend on plant partners. These fungi ...