Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Life Sciences - Anatomy & Physiology

It was the botanist Ernst Munch, who separated the plant into two principal compartments, the "dead" apoplast and the living symplast. Only during the last 20 years cell walls attracted the interest of a broader group of plant scientists. We know today that apoplastic functions are much more diverse. The apoplast may be considered as "the internal physiological environment of plant bodies," that essentially maintains homeostasis. The term 'cell wall' may be misleading, since the chemical and physical properties of cell walls are not fixed but rapidly respond to environmental stimuli. This...

Plant disease epidemiology deals with diseases in plant populations. During the past century, it has become a vibrant field of science, achieving significant conceptual innovations with an important impact on the management of plant diseases. Plant disease epidemiology mobilises concepts and methods from ecology, genetics, environmental physics, botany, and mathematics. It deals with cultivated and non-cultivated plants in environments where human activities may have had an impact. Now, plant disease epidemiology faces important questions. Global climate is changing at a rapid rate: will...

Glimpses of Creatures in Their Physical Worlds offers an eye-opening look into how the characteristics of the physical world drive the designs of animals and plants. These characteristics impose limits but also create remarkable and subtle opportunities for the functional biology of organisms. In particular, Steven Vogel examines the size and scale, and trade-offs among different physical processes. He pays attention to how the forms and activities of animals and plants reflect the materials available to nature, and he explores the unique constraints and possibilities provided...

Sex is the queen of problems in evolutionary biology. Generations of researchers have investigated one of the last remaining evolutionary paradoxes: why sex exists at all. Given that sexual reproduction is costly from an evolutionary point of view, one could wonder why not all animals and plants reproduce asexually. Dozens of contemporary hypotheses attempt to explain the prevalence of sex and its advantages and predict the early extinction of fully asexual lineages.

The major theme of this book is: what is the fate of animal and plant groups in which sex is lost? Initial chapters...