Category: Uncategorized

PAST-BIASED MARKER. "Studies of plant intelligence have tended to concentrate on memory as a benchmark of intelligent behavior. Although memory has a bearing on all three modalities of time, including a remembered past event, the present of storage and the possibility of future retrieval, it is a marker of intelligence heavily biased toward the past." http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/psb.23902#abstract View in LinkedIn

INCREASED SALINITY LEVELS. "One of the questions that has to remain open is how exactly do seagrasses deal with the high salinity of the ocean. Seagrasses have been found to harbor increased intracellular levels of Na+ and K+ as compared to terrestrial angiosperm species as well as to other aquatic angiosperms." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

SALT TOLERANCE. "Physiologically, however, seagrasses must cope with high ion concentrations, inefficient carbon uptake and other physical coping mechanisms that are still poorly understood." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

FRESH VS SALT WATER. "A number of terrestrial lineages of plants have evolved into aquatic-freshwater hydrophytes and a number of morphological features are shared by both hydrophytes and seagrasses, e.g., the presence of a diffusive boundary layer around the leaves, a photosynthetic epidermis, loss of stomata and the development of aerenchyma." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

DATA LIMITATIONS. "The available dataset allowed only for the investigation of 189 orthologous clusters, equivalent to ~1% of the A. thaliana genome. Since orthologous clusters include only ESTs from both seagrasses, the presented dataset is not an unbiased sample of the genome and is probably enriched for genes that show significant expression levels in both seagrass species." (ESTs = expressed sequence tags). http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR ADAPTATION. "These adaptations are possibly associated to the above mentioned Na+ toxicity which seagrasses have likely experienced during their evolution towards the marine environment. To this respect, molecular adaptation of key cellular processes known to be sensitive towards increased ionic levels such as photosynthesis, translation, and selected metabolic enzymes are expected." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

KEY GENES. "Positive selection for 51 genes was detected after the split from terrestrial monocots based on a maximum likelihood approach. In the present analysis, many of the identified PSGs are involved in the central biological pathways of translation, photosynthesis, and glycolysis." (PSGs= positively selected genes). http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

PARALLEL SOLUTIONS. "Seagrasses have been found to share morphological traits that distinguish them from terrestrial plants such as reduced stamen and corolla, and elongated pollen without exine walls. Except for the genus Enhalus with above-surface pollination, all of the 60 seagrass species exhibit true sub-aqueous pollination by means of filiforme pollen (hydrophily). This adaptation to a marine habitat is thus an example of morphological parallel evolution." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

SHARED MORPHOLOGY. "Most seagrass species share a secondarily simplified morphology which includes horizontal rhizomes and strap-like leaves originating from a basal meristem." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn