Tag: Botany

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The year’s best species

Mystery protist.

Apes, snailfish and amphipods.

The year’s best species.

 

Every year since 2008 the College of Environmental Science and Forestry has released a Top 10 New Species list. 2018’s selection include single celled organisms, plants and animals (including two species of beetle) as well as a prehistoric marsupial lion identified from fossils. All 10 species are fascinating but those highlighted in the sciku are:

Protist – Ancoracysta twista, a single celled predatory Eukaryote with harpoon-like organelles that it uses to immobilise its prey. Intriguingly its evolutionary origins are unclear and it doesn’t fit neatly within any known groups.

Ape – Orangutans now come in three flavours: Bornean, Sumatran and now a newly identified Southern Sumatran species of orangutans. It is the most endangered great ape in the world.

Snailfish – Whilst snailfish are found at all depths, 2018’s species is the deepest fish in the sea, found in the Mariana Trench at 7,966 meters below the surface. It appears to be the top predator in its benthic community and is tadpole-like and around 4 inches long.

Amphipod – Epimeria quasimodo is found in the Antarctic Ocean. The 2 inch long crustacean takes its name from the hunchback of Notre Dame and has beautiful vivid colours.

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Crop blighter

Rice blast: crop blighter.

Inhibiting one protein

stops the fungal spread.

 

Up to 30% of rice crop is destroyed by rice blast every year, causing huge welfare and economic costs. Sakulkoo et al (2018) have found that inhibiting a single protein enzyme in the fungus stops the spread of the blight through a rice plant.

The fungus’s mitogen-activated protein Pmk1 plays a role in suppressing its host’s immune system and controls the ability of the fungus to move from one rice cell to another. By inhibiting Pmk1’s kinase the fungus is trapped within the infected rice cell and is unable to spread and infect the rest of the rice plant. This latest discovery could point the way towards new rice blast control methods, resulting in increased food security and economic development.

Original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0892

 

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Closing the trap by Dr Hortense Le Ferrand

A feather falling –

hungry inert soul wakes up,

snaps, closing the trap.

The Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is a carnivorous plant that performs one of the fastest movements in the flora: when an insects touches the hairs inside the leaves of the trap, it closes in a few milliseconds.

Inspired by the plants and its internal microstructure, a team of researchers from ETH Zürich and Purdue University have developed a composite material mimicking the Venus leaf and able to change shape as fast as the plant (Schmied & Le Ferrand et al, 2017).

Thanks to the good match between the theoretical simulations and the experimental results, their method opens new avenues for the creation of autonomous and fast robotic devices.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-3190/aa5efd

Dr Hortense Le Ferrand is a postdoctoral fellow at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. Hortense’s interests are on the fabrication and design of novel materials and systems inspired by nature. Check out her other scku ‘Shrimp molting’ here.

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An orphan crop

Yam: an orphan crop,

vital yet disregarded.

Gene map may assist.

 

Yams are a stable tuber crop in tropical Africa yet their cultivation has been constrained due to little interest from the rest of the world, their susceptibility to pests and diseases, and their awkward propagation. As such they can be referred to as an “orphan crop that would benefit from crop improvement efforts”.

To help the humble yam’s lot, researchers have sequenced the genome of the white Guinea yam (Tamiru et al, 2017). The research has revealed that yams belong to a unique genus (Dioscorea) that is distinct from rice, palm and banana groups. Yams have separate male and female plants (a limiting factor for yam breeding efforts) but the research has now revealed that yams use female heterogametic sex determination – unlike our XX females and XY males, yams have ZZ males and ZW females meaning that it’s the female gamete that determines the sex of individual offspring. The research hopes to assist yam breeding and cultivation efforts as well as improve food security and sustainability.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-017-0419-x

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Blossoms

Cherry blossoms dance

across the road like heat haze

on a summer day.

 

Ok, this is not technically a sciku but since haiku have traditionally had a strong association with cherry blossoms it felt right for The Sciku Project to feature a cherry blossom based haiku.