On extreme altruistic behaviour

The paper “Evolution of suicide as a defence strategy against pathogens in a spatially structured environment” is about bacteria, but plant populations can also be spatially structured. Probably plants do not commit suicide, but it would be worthwhile looking at other possible altruistic types of behaviour in plants within the context of this analysis. The paper is at

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.12064/abstract

A related paper “Altruism can evolve when relatedness is low: evidence from bacteria committing suicide upon phage infection.”  This paper is available at

 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1759/20123035

Maybe these papers could be discussed in a future journal club.

A review on shade avoidance

Jorge Casal has published a review on the mechanisms behind shade avoidance. It includes all the latest advances, e.g. responses to blue:green photon ratio and how signals present at different times of the day are integrated.

Casal, J. J. (2012) Shade Avoidance. The Arabidopsis Book, The Arabidopsis Book, The American Society of Plant Biologists, 2012, e0157-

Ariel Novoplansky’s lab’s paper on stomata

The paper about Ariel’s group work on plant-plant communication of stress signals is now online.
The reference is:
Falik O, Mordoch Y, Quansah L, Fait A, Novoplansky A, 2011 Rumor Has It…: Relay Communication of Stress Cues in Plants. PLoS ONE 6(11): e23625. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023625

It is open access at: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023625

This is related to what Ariel talked about in his Monday talk lecture.

A couple of papers

A couple of new papers by our friends at IFEVA appeared this week.

Carlos’ paper on litter decomposition, lignin and sunlight in PNAS.

Jorge’s paper on mutant Arabidopsis deficient in all five phytochromes in PNAS.

Enjoy!