What can communicate but has no mouth, and can attack but has no hands? A plant! You might love the beauty and fragrance of flowers, but plants are far more complex than meets the eye. Some plants have ways of luring insects for pollination. Others mimic the look of the female insects whose male counterparts they want to attract. The Venus flytrap eats insects and other small animals for extra nourishment. You might see some of these ninja plants—with their sneaky and deceitful ways—in your own backyard. These plants might even be sitting on a windowsill in your home. This fascinating world of ninja plants is waiting to be discovered.
Like ninja warriors, many plants rely on deceit, camouflage, sneak attacks, and other irregular techniques to survive. Peel-away bark. Poisonous sap. Smelly odors and distasteful leaves. These and other adaptive features have helped plants adapt to their environments and survive. This visually appealing title walks readers through basic concepts of evolution, life cycles, adaptation, survival, interdependence in ecosystems, resilience, and other biological features of the plant kingdom.
Plants sit at the bottom of the food chain. They provide meals for the vast majority of animals on earth, but what if the food chain were upset? Strange as it may sound, there are places on virtually every continent where plants are the hunters and animals the hunted. Some plants move so quickly that insects do not know what hit them. Others lay elaborate traps to lure their prey. Featuring stunning full-color photographs, informative sidebars, and accessible text, this book will fascinate young readers as it introduces them to real meat-eating plants of the world.
When it comes to survival, plants are regular pros, but their defenses aren't always easy to see. This high-interest science book exposes the plant kingdom's biggest secrets, allowing readers to really understand what goes on under the soil and right in front of our faces. Budding botanists will be excited to learn the varied ways plants protect themselves, from color-muted camouflage to painful pokers and everything in between. Engaging language, high impact fact boxes, and photographs make this elementary science content memorable and fun.
Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of the natural origins and early evolution of this famous plant, highlighting its historic role in the development of human societies. Cannabis has long been prized for the strong and durable fiber in its stalks, its edible and oil-rich seeds, and the psychoactive and medicinal compounds produced by its female flowers. The culturally valuable and often irreplaceable goods derived from cannabis deeply influenced the commercial, medical, ritual, and religious practices of cultures throughout the ages, and human desire for these commodities directed the evolution of the plant toward its contemporary varieties. As interest in cannabis grows and public debate over its many uses rises, this book will help us understand why humanity continues to rely on this plant and adapts it to suit our needs.
Molecular Plant Immunity provides an integrated look at both well-established and emerging concepts in plant disease resistance providing the most current information on this important vitally important topic within plant biology. Understanding the molecular basis of the plant immune system has implications on the development of new varieties of sustainable crops, understanding the challenges plant life will face in changing environments, as well as providing a window into immune function that could have translational appeal to human medicine. Molecular Plant Immunity opens with chapters reviewing how the first line of plant immune response is activated followed by chapters looking at the molecular mechanisms that allow fungi, bacteria, and oomycetes to circumvent those defenses. Plant resistance proteins, which provide the second line of plant immune defense, are then covered followed by chapters on the role of hormones in immunity and the mechanisms that modulate specific interaction between plants and viruses. The final chapters look at model plant-pathogen systems to review interaction between plants and fungal, bacterial, and viral pathogens. Written by a leading team of international experts, Molecular Plant Immunity will provide a needed resource to diverse research community investigated plant immunity.
Abiotic stresses such as high temperature, low-temperature, drought and salinity limit crop productivity worldwide. Understanding plant responses to these stresses is essential for rational engineering of crop plants. In Arabidopsis, the signal transduction pathways for abiotic stresses, light, several phytohormones and pathogenesis have been elucidated. A significant portion of plant genomes (Arabidopsis and rice were mostly studied) encodes for proteins involves in signaling such as receptor, sensors, kinases, phosphatases, transcription factors and transporters/channels. Despite decades of physiological and molecular effort, knowledge pertaining to how plants sense and transduce low and high temperature, low-water availability (drought), water-submergence, microgravity and salinity signals is still a major question for plant biologist. One major constraint hampering our understanding of these signal transduction processes in plants has been the lack or slow pace of application of molecular genomic and genetics knowledge in the form of gene function. In the post-genomic era, one of the major challenges is investigation and understanding of multiple genes and gene families regulating a particular physiological and developmental aspect of plant life cycle. One of the important physiological processes is regulation of stress response, which leads to adaptation or adjustment in response to adverse stimuli. With the holistic understanding of the signaling pathways involving not only one gene family but multiple genes or gene families, plant biologist can lay a foundation for designing and generating future crops, which can withstand the higher degree of environmental stresses (especially abiotic stresses, which are the major cause of crop loss throughout the world) without losing crop yield and productivity. Therefore, in this e-Book, we intend to incorporate the contribution from leading plant biologists to elucidate several aspects of stress signaling by functional genomics approaches.
