Photosynthesis ... Eventually, no later than a billion years ago, one of these protists formed a symbiotic relationship with a cyanobacterium, producing the ancestor of many plants and algae...
Phytochemistry ... Constituent elements The list of simple elements of which plants are primarily constructed—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, calcium, phosphorus, etc.—is not different from similar lists for animals, fungi, or even bacteria... The fundamental atomic components of plants are the same as for all life; only the details of the way in which they are assembled differs...
Algae ... Though the prokaryotic cyanobacteria (commonly referred to as blue-green algae) were traditionally included as "algae" in older textbooks, many modern sources regard this as outdated as they are now considered to be bacteria. The term algae is now restricted to eukaryotic organisms...
Shrubland ... Shrubland species generally show a wide range of adaptations to fire, such as heavy seed production, lignotubers, and fire-induced germination. Shrubland as a botanical structural form In botany and ecology a shrub is defined as a much-branched woody plant less than 8 m high and usually with many stems...
Flower ... These modifications have significance in the evolution of flowering plants and are used extensively by botanists to establish relationships among plant species...
Plant Hormone ... Hormones are vital to plant growth, and, lacking them, plants would be mostly a mass of undifferentiated cells... They are used to regulate the growth of cultivated plants, weeds, and in vitro-grown plants and plant cells; these manmade compounds are called Plant Growth Regulators or PGRs for short...
Medieval Gardening ... For the purposes of this article, the European medieval era will be considered to span from 400 to 1400 CE, though appropriate references may be made to earlier and later times. Gardening is the deliberate cultivation of plants herbs, fruits, flowers, or vegetables...
Evolutionary History Of Plants ... By the middle of the Devonian Period most of the features recognised in plants today are present, including roots, leaves and secondary wood, and by late Devonian times seeds had evolved... Late Devonian plants had thereby reached a degree of sophistication that allowed them to form forests of tall trees...
Biological Dispersal ... Biological dispersal may be contrasted with geodispersal, which is the mixing of previously isolated populations (or whole biotas) following the erosion of geographic barriers to dispersal or gene flow (Lieberman, 2005; Albert and Reis, 2011). Types of dispersal At some time during its life, an organism, whether animal or plant, moves, or is moved, so that it or its offspring do not die exactly where they were born...
Spermatophyte ... A middle Devonian precursor to seed plants from Belgium has been identified predating the earliest seed plants by about 20 million years... Runcaria has all of the qualities of seed plants except for a solid seed coat and a system to guide the pollen to the seed... Relationships and nomenclature Further information: Gnetophyta#Classification Seed-bearing plants were traditionally divided into angiosperms, or flowering plants, and gymnosperms, which includes the gnetophytes, cycads, ginkgo, and conifers...
Herbivore ... Herbivory usually refers to animals eating plants; fungi, bacteria and protists that feed on living plants are usually termed plant pathogens (plant diseases),and microbes that feed on dead plants are saprotrophs...
Tree ... The majority of tree species grow in tropical regions of the world and many of these areas have not been surveyed yet by botanists, making species diversity and ranges poorly understood.t The earliest tree-like organisms were tree ferns, horsetails and lycophytes, which grew in forests in the Carboniferous period, however these were plants were not trees, since they lacked woody tissue... Trees evolved in the Triassic period, with conifers, ginkgos, cycads and other gymnosperms appeared producing woody tissue, and were subsequently followed by tree-form flowering plants in the Cretaceous period...
Bryophyte ... Although a 2005 study supported the traditional view that the bryophytes form a monophyletic group, the preponderance of currently available evidence suggests that the hornworts are sister to vascular plants and liverworts are sister to all other land plants, as shown in the cladogram below... embryophytes tracheophytes hornworts mosses liverworts bryophytes When extinct plants are taken into account, the picture is slightly altered... There are extinct land plants, such as the horneophytes, which are not bryophytes, but also are not vascular plants since like bryophytes they do not have true vascular tissue...
Plant Pathology ... The fungi reproduce both sexually and asexually via the production of spores and other structures. Spores may be spread long distances by air or water, or they may be soil borne...
Pollination ... In spite of a common perception that pollen grains are gametes, like the sperm cells of animals, this is incorrect; pollination is a phase in the alternation of generations: each pollen grain is a male haploid plant, a gametophyte, adapted to being transported to the female gametophyte, where it can achieve fertilization by producing the male gamete (or gametes, in the process of double fertilization). As such the Angiosperm successful pollen grain (gametophyte) containing the male gametes (sperm) gets transported to the stigma, where it germinates and its pollen tube grows down the style to the ovary...