cell walls
Fertile soil doesn't fall from the sky
Remains of dead bacteria have far greater meaning for soils than previously assumed. Around 40 per cent of the microbial biomass is converted to organic soil…
NREL researchers use imaging technologies to solve puzzle of plant architecture
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) combined different…
A Better Route to Xylan
After cellulose, xylan is the most abundant biomass material on Earth, and therefore represents an enormous potential source of stored solar energy for the…
Plants exhibit a wide range of mechanical properties, engineers find
From an engineer’s perspective, plants such as palm trees, bamboo, maples and even potatoes are examples of precise engineering on a microscopic scale. Like…
Magnetizing Diagnostics
Gram staining of bacteria is a routine diagnostic method of long standing that can be used for initial diagnoses and to simplify the choice of antibiotics. It…
Blossom end rot plummets in Purdue-developed transgenic tomato
In the early 1990s, horticulture professor Avtar Handa developed a transgenic tomato with a thicker juice that yields 10 percent more tomato paste than…