Bamboos, unlike other grasses, mostly live in association with forests. Two different types of bamboos are recognized: the thick, hard “woody” bamboos, reaching up to 40 m tall, and the softer-stemmed “herbaceous” bamboos, rarely reaching more than 1 m tall. Worldwide, over 1,650 bamboo species are known, and although many people think of bamboos as Asian, 530 species (about one-third of total ...

Bamboos are among the economically most important plants world-wide. In Europe bamboos are used as ornamentals for gardens, but there is increasing interest for uses in ecological applications and as energy crops. Biotechnological techniques, including tissue culture, in vitro hybridisation, molecular markers and genetic transformation are crucial for the future of bamboo. Micropropagation of b...

Moso bamboo can rapidly complete its growth in both height and diameter within only 35-40 days after shoot emergence. However, the underlying mechanism for this "explosive growth" remains poorly understood. We investigated the dynamics of non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs) in shoots and attached mature bamboos over a 20-month period. The results showed that Moso bamboos rapidly completed their...

Bambusoideae is a diverse subfamily that includes herbaceous (Olyreae) and woody (Arundinarieae and Bambuseae) bamboos. Species within Bambusae are particularly difficult to identify due to their monocarpic lifecycle and the often long durations between mass flowering events; whereas the herbaceous bamboos are pluricarpic, but often are found with no reproductive structures. The leaf blade anat...

To elucidate chloroplast genome evolution within neotropical-paleotropical bamboos, we fully characterized the chloroplast genome of the woody bamboo Guadua angustifolia. This genome is 135,331 bp long and comprises of an 82,839-bp large single-copy (LSC) region, a 12,898-bp small single-copy (SSC) region, and a pair of 19,797-bp inverted repeats (IRs). Comparative analyses revealed marked cons...

The subfamily Bambusoideae (bamboos) is one of 12 subfamilies in Poaceae (grass family) and is primarily associated with forest habitats. Bambusoideae, which include nearly 1,500 species worldwide, is classified into two tribes of woody bamboos (the tropical Bambuseae and the temperate Arundinarieae) and one tribe of herbaceous bamboos (the Olyreae). The Arundinarieae, with ca. 550 species, is ...

The classification of bamboos based on floral morphology and reproductive characters is very hard due to erratic flowering behavior and unusually long reproductive cycle. The application of reliable and effective DNA molecular markers is highly essential to address this problem. In the present investigation, inter-simple sequence repeats (ISSR) markers were employed to study phylogenetic relati...

Bamboos were introduced into Europe from China and Japan in the early 1800s and their cultivation in parks and gardens became quite popular. The first records of scale insects on ornamental bamboos in Europe date to early in the XX century (i.e. Kuwanaspis pseudoleucaspis), but the presence of some species was unknown until recently due to their concealed habit (i.e. Balanococcus kwoni Pellizza...

Molecular data was reviewed for the woody bamboo account in the English language Flora of China. The implications for recognition of suprageneric taxa and genera, for macro-morphological characters used in classification systems, and for the inferred biogeographical history of Asian bamboos are discussed. Support was not found for large supertribes based on inflorescence structure. Instead a re...

The bamboo fire cycle hypothesis proposed by Keeley and Bond (1999) argues that lightning-ignited wildfire has synchronized flowering and recruitment of bamboos throughout Asia. They argue that mast flowering followed by mass mortality leads to fuel-load accumulation, encouraging ignition by lightning strikes that results in complete consumption of litter and dead stalks, which both enhances ba...