Latest Pollen Stories

The longer days and warmer weather are not only a sign that spring has sprung, but also a signal that allergies are in full bloom. Doctors at Baylor College of Medicine have a few tips on how to get through the season."As the weather gets warmer and humid we see increasing levels of tree pollen, followed by grass pollen and to some degree mold spores later in the season," said Dr. Madhu Narra, assistant professor of medicine in the section of allergy, immunology and rheumatology at...

A new University of Florida study of 45-million-year-old pollen from Pine Island west of Fort Myers has led to a new understanding of the state's geologic history, showing Florida could be 10 million to 15 million years older than previously believed.The discovery of land in Florida during the early Eocene opens the possibility for researchers to explore the existence of land animals at that time, including their adaptation, evolution and dispersal until the present.Florida Museum of Natural...

Warmer temperatures and later autumn frosts have been the main sources for why the ragweed allergy season in North America has grown two to four weeks longer than usual, according to researchers. Northern regions of the United States and Canada have seen a dramatic rise in the length of the allergy season between 1995 and 2009, said researchers, who published a report in Tuesday's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Saskatoon, in Saskatchewan, Canada had the longest...

Study uncovers genetic hierarchy in plant sperm formationBiologists at the University of Leicester have published results of a new study into the intricacies of sex in flowering plants.They have found that a gene in plants, called DUO1, acts as a master switch to ensure twin fertile sperm cells are made in each pollen grain.The research identifies for the first time that DUO1 switches on a battery of genes that together govern sperm cell production and their ability to produce seeds..The...

Many plants produce toxic chemicals to protect themselves against plant-eating animals, and many flowering plants have evolved flower structures that prevent pollinators such as bees from taking too much pollen. Now ecologists have produced experimental evidence that flowering plants might also use chemical defenses to protect their pollen from some bees. The results are published next week in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology.In an elegant experiment, Claudio Sedivy...

Scientists have discovered why orchids are one of the most successful groups of flowering plants - it is all down to their relationships with the bees that pollinate them and the fungi that nourish them. The study, published tomorrow in the American Naturalist, is the culmination of a ten-year research project in South Africa involving researchers from Imperial College London, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and other international institutions.The orchid family is one of the largest groups...

When it comes to pollen formation, seed plants go for overproductionPlants producing flower pollen must not leave anything to chance. The model plant thale cress (Arabidopsis), for instance, uses three signaling pathways in concert with partially overlapping functions. The yield becomes the greatest when all three processes are active; however, two are sufficient to form an acceptable quantity of flower pollen. In a new study, Peter Huijser and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for...

Pollinators interact with their landscapes to affect the genetic structure of 3 Penstemon species in the Great BasinDo mountain tops act as sky islands for species that live at high elevations? Are plant populations on these mountain tops isolated from one another because the valleys between them act as barriers, or can pollinators act as bridges allowing genes to flow among distant populations?Dr. Andrea Kramer and colleagues from the Chicago Botanic Garden and the University of Illinois at...

SAN ANTONIO, Jan. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- While the rest of the nation battles frigid cold and snow storms, South Texans are dealing with a massive blizzard of pollen. Record-breaking Mountain Cedar pollen counts - the worst since the 90s - are causing even the least symptomatic to suffer. Mountain Cedar, the most prolific pollinating tree in the world, is a drought-tolerant evergreen shrub or small tree, most prevalent in South Central Texas. The pollen can cause a severe allergic...

Tomato plants use similar biochemical mechanisms to reject pollen from their own flowers as well as pollen from foreign but related plant species, thus guarding against both inbreeding and cross-species hybridization, report plant scientists at the University of California, Davis.The researchers identified a tomato pollen gene that encodes a protein that is very similar to a protein thought to function in preventing self-pollination in petunias. The tomato gene also was shown to play a role...