Plants Quick to Let Their Flowers Fade for Protection, Show New Field Experiments and Microbiome
Published:27 Jul.2022 Source:Pensoft Publishers
Microbes growing on flowers have adverse effects on their yields. This is why plants are quick to shed their flowers, reveals a new study involving both field experiments and plant microbiome analysis.
The findings -- made by a joint team of researchers from the Centre for Research on Ecology and Forestry Applications (CREAF, Spain) and Kyoto University (Japan) -- are published in the open-access scholarly journal Metabarcoding and Metagenomics. Scientifically speaking, flowers are a reproductive structure of a plant. Unlike mammals, though, perennial plants develop those de novo every season and only retain them for as long as needed.