Plant Biology

Each plant's development unfolds along many trade‐off axes. One common trade‐off is engendered by the differential allocation of tissues to harvest essential resources from the surrounding environment. Generally, photosynthetic leaves capture light energy and carbon dioxide, whereas roots take up...

Five years ago, the United Nations committed to achieving the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger by 2030. Since then, however, world hunger has continued to rise. Nearly 9 percent of our global population is now undernourished, according to a...

The U.S. backs out of the Paris climate agreement even as carbon dioxide (CO2) levels continue to rise. Through photosynthesis, plants are able to turn CO2 into yield. Logic tells us that more CO2 should boost crop production, but a new review, involving co-author Stephen...

Plant biology researchers at the University of Illinois and computer scientists at the University of California Irvine have developed a new method of fossil pollen identification through the combination of super-resolution microscopy and machine learning. The team, led by...

From southeastern Florida to northern Mississippi to the Midwestern Corn Belt, CABBI scientists, including our own Don Ort and Steve Long, have struck sustainable oil with sugarcane. But the crop’s potential value to the renewable energy...

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce the Illinois Regenerative Agriculture Initiative (IRAI), a new home for regenerative...

The banyan fig tree Ficus microcarpa is famous for its aerial roots, which sprout from branches and eventually reach the soil. The tree also has a unique relationship with a wasp that has coevolved with it and is the only insect that can pollinate it. In...

A research team, including Lisa Ainsworth and D.K. Lee with the University of Illinois' Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (...

Crops grow dense canopies that consist of several layers of leaves—the upper layers with younger sun leaves and the lower layers with older shaded leaves that may have difficulty intercepting sunlight trickling down from the top layers. In a recent study...

For 25 years, Carol Augspurger visited a patch of ancient woods near Urbana to look at the same 25 one-square-meter plots of earth she first demarcated for study in 1993. She surveyed the plots once a week in spring and summer, tracking the major life events of each...