Silicon as Versatile Player in Plant and Human Biology: Overlooked and Poorly Understood

Silicon as Versatile Player in Plant and Human Biology: Overlooked and Poorly Understood

Silicon (Si) serves as bioactive beneficial element. Si is highly abundant in soil, and occurs ubiquitously in all organisms including plants and humans. During the last three decades, nutritional significance of Si for plant and human health has received increasing attention. Plant Si plays a pivotal role in growth and development, and this beneficial effect depends usually on accumulation in ...

Abscisic acid - an overlooked player in plant-microbe symbioses formation?

Abscisic acid (ABA) is an ubiquitous plant hormone and one of the foremost signalling molecules, controlling plants' growth and development, as well as their response to environmental stresses. To date, the function of ABA has been extensively investigated as an abiotic stress molecule which regulates the plants' water status. However, in the context of symbiotic associations, ABA is less recog...

Thrombosis – Besieged but Poorly Understood

In biology, thrombosis is a mechanism of maintaining the integrity of biological surfaces in higher mammals, limiting fluid loss, and facilitating the recognition, containment, and destruction of pathogens and foreign materials by a scaffold of fibrin and DNA strands. However, thrombosis may also lead to vascular occlusion and subsequent tissue damage. In medicine, thrombosis is a hallmark of l...

Premenstrual asthma: still poorly understood.

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and plant biology: the overlooked paradigm.

As human populations continue to expand, concurrent increases in energy and food will be required. Consequently, fossil-fuel burning and deforestation will continue to be human-derived sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). The current annual rate of CO2 increase ( 0.5%) from these sources is expected to continue with concentrations exceeding 600 parts per million (ppm) by the end of the ...