Living jewels: iterative evolution of iridescent blue leaves from helicoidal cell walls.

Background And Aims: Structural colour is responsible for the remarkable metallic blue colour seen in the leaves of several plants. Species belonging to only ten genera have been investigated to date, revealing four photonic structures responsible for structurally coloured leaves. One of these is the helicoidal cell wall, known to create structural colour in the leaf cells of five taxa.

Stomatal development and orientation: a phylogenetic and ecophysiological perspective.

Background: Oriented patterning of epidermal cells is achieved primarily by transverse protodermal cell divisions perpendicular to the organ axis, followed by axial cell elongation. In linear leaves with parallel venation, most stomata are regularly aligned with the veins. This longitudinal patterning operates under a strong developmental constraint and has demonstrable physiological benefits, especially in grasses.

Reproductive development of common buckwheat ( Moench) and its wild relatives provides insights into their evolutionary biology.

Introduction: Understanding the complex inflorescence architecture and developmental morphology of common buckwheat () is crucial for crop yield. However, most published descriptions of early flower and inflorescence development in Polygonaceae are based on light microscopy and often documented by line drawings. In and many other Polygonaceae, an important inflorescence module is the thyrse, in which the primary axis never terminates in a flower and lateral cymes (monochasia) produce successively developing flowers of several orders.

Morphological Continua Make Poor Species: Genus-Wide Morphometric Survey of the European Bee Orchids ( L.).

Despite (or perhaps because of) intensive multidisciplinary research, opinions on the optimal number of species recognised within the Eurasian orchid genus range from nine to at least 400. The lower figure of nine macrospecies is based primarily on seeking small but reliable discontinuities in DNA 'barcode' regions, an approach subsequently reinforced and finessed via high-throughput sequencing studies. The upper figure of ca.