ABA is a plant hormone produced in plants under drought stress. On one hand, it causes the plant to conserve its water status; on the other hand, it reduces growth and productivity. This opinion review examines the available data on ABA and attempts to resolve this conundrum by formulating an appropriate crop plant phenotypic ABA ideotype for breeders to pursue within different dryland stress environments.

Infertility prevents genetics research and conventional breeding in garlic. Recent achievement of fertility restoration enables extensive studies of garlic florogenesis and causes for male sterility. We report on temperature effects on flower development and pollen quality in fertile and male-sterile garlic, and on the vulnerable phases of pollen formation. It is concluded that under unstable climatic conditions, agro-management modifications will facilitate breeding and seed production in this important crop.

Understanding how functional traits are associated with habitats is of great importance in plant biology. Through investigating a suite of branch and leaf functional traits of three Syzygium tree species in different successional tropical forests, we demonstrate that traits related to photosynthesis and/or hydraulics, rather than to drought tolerance, are key factors underlying the response and adaptation of these congeneric species to different environments.

Neptune seagrass, (P. oceanica) plays an important biological and ecological role in marine ecosystems. We studied the acclimation capacity of P. oceanica at different depth and light regimes, finding that the inner structure of leaf cells changes in a way similar to that shown by phytoplankton cells to low light conditions. This result could offer new opportunities for understanding seagrass adaptations to the marine ecosystem.

Co-existence mechanisms of different plant species in an ecosystem are one of the mysteries of nature. This field investigation in a natural estuarine ecosystem used isotopic fingerprints of water and nutrients to understand co-existing plant species in resource sharing or partitioning. Facilitation and competition were found co-occurring between two different plant pairs for water and nutrient in the estuarine wetlands.

Rates of plant growth and their reaction to main environmental factors such as temperature are difficult to determine under field conditions. By segmenting plant leaves from background in images taken from wheat plots, we were able to show significant variation among varieties for their response in canopy cover growth rates to changing temperatures. The developed approach is simple and fast and can be used to screen genetic mapping populations for growth response patterns to temperature and other environmental factors.

The regulatory mechanisms of biomass allocation and the morphological and physiological traits of leaves in response to light and N availability are not fully understood. We found that both gibberellins and cytokinins are closely involved in the regulatory mechanisms in Polygonum cuspidatum. The results will help to further our understanding of plant morphogenesis in response to light and N availability.

Stomata movements are regulated by air humidity. The aim of this work was to study the role of ethylene and abscisic acid in air humidity stomatal responses. We show that both ethylene production and sensitivity play a role in high air humidity promoted stomatal opening and that high level of abscisic acid can inhibit the opening. The results indicate an interaction between ethylene and abscisic acid and provide novel insight into the role of plant hormones in air humidity regulated stomatal movements.

Grapevine (Vitis vinifera) is known for its cultivar variability in response to deficit irrigation. A 3 year study, comparing Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon petioles anatomy, showed that Shiraz had larger vessels diameter that resulted in higher hydraulic conductivity and transpiration rates. These traits lead to lower water potentials and vulnerability to cavitation. Our results provide a link between xylem anatomy and plant performances.

Extreme high temperature can threaten rice (Oryza sativa L.) production by decreasing its seed setting percentage; however, sufficient nitrogen can alleviate this detrimental effect. Heat-tolerant cultivars show high leaf transpiration and nonstructural carbohydrates, and sufficient nitrogen can improve them. This suggests that sufficient leaf transpiration and nonstructural carbohydrates are beneficial for high-temperature tolerance in three rice cultivars and two N treatments.

This study sought to provide a biophysical basis for the common observation that shoot vigour in grapevines declines as the number of shoots per plant increases. We found that the plant’s capacity to supply water to its canopy adapts to the shoot number; however, limited adaptation, rather than competition with fruit growth, may constrain shoot growth and fruit growth. These findings may be used to optimise cultural practices that balance shoot and fruit growth for maximum quality.

We investigated the formation of agarwood, a substance believed to have interesting medicinal properties and that is produced only by certain plants when they are responding to an injury or infection. We evaluated the effects of hydrogen peroxide on cells of the plant Aquilaria sinensis; as we expected, the plant cells responded to this damaging chemical with specific changes in gene expression and the production of compounds known to be linked with toxicity and programmed cell death. Our results indicate that exposure to a reactive oxygen species, such as hydrogen peroxide, produces multiple cellular responses that culminate in an effective defensive reaction on the part of the plant (i.e. production of agarwood).

The evaluation of root system recovery methods for X-ray microcomputed tomography images is a challenging task. In this work, we aim to raise awareness of the evaluation problem and to propose experimental approaches that allow the performance of root extraction methods to be assessed. This should help users to better understand the strengths and limitations of each method and should allow a better comparison.

High-throughput phenotyping facilities provide opportunities for plant development observation and monitoring on new scales, but also present new problems in automatic image analysis. This paper presents a solution to one such problem by automating the detection of flowering in oats. This demonstrates the applicability of state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms to phenotyping, which may well be of value in similar atlas-based measurement.

Accurate and non-invasive measures of wheat grain morphometry can have impact on improvements in milling yield. An automated approach is presented to extract such measures from wheat CT data. The results show significant differences in measures between two disparate strains of wheat.

Realistic virtual models of leaf surfaces are important for several applications in plant sciences, such as simulating agrichemical spray droplet motion on the leaf surface. Although there are effective approaches for reconstructing leaf surface from 3D scanned data, complications arise when dealing with wheat (Triticum aestivum) leaves, which tend to twist and bend. We present an algorithm that overcomes this topological difficulty, allowing significantly more leaf varieties to be modelled in this way.

Quantifying the colocalisation of labels is a major application of fluorescent microscopy in plant biology. Pixel-based quantification of colocalisation, such as Pearson’s correlation coefficient, gives limited information for further analysis. We show how applying bioimage informatics tools to a commonplace experiment allows further quantifiable results to be extracted. We use our object-based colocalisation technique to extract distance information, show temporal changes and demonstrate the advantages and pitfalls of using bioimage informatics for plant science.

The total area of the leaves on a plant is important in horticulture, but manually measuring it is tedious and destructive. Getting a computer to recognise and count leaves is difficult, so we have used statistical methods to relate leaf area to the variations in colour in an image. This has potential to be a big help for scientists developing and testing new crop cultivars.