Jack climbed a beanstalk so tall that it could only exist in a fairy tale. Audrey II demands that Seymour feed her larger and larger quantities of human blood in the cult classic Little Shop of Horrors, and venomous, predatory triffids spread like kudzu in the 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. The 2009 sci-fi movie Avatar even comes with its own guide to the exotic flora of the moon Pandora, where plants communicate with each other via “signal transduction from root to root.”
The panoply of fictional plants offers a large and varied dose of the weird and wonderful. But there’s no need to resort to fiction to find truly unusual plant characteristics.
Our January issue explores some of these unique biological traits. “Researchers have stumbled upon some ‘mind-blowing’ findings in plant genomics,” reports Megan Scudellari in “Genomes Gone Wild.” Plant genomes vary enormously in size, from some 64 million to 150 billion base pairs. (The human genome rings in at about 3.5 billion.) Plants succeeded in dramatically expanding their genomes again and again through a process of chromosome-number multiplication called polyploidy, which usually begins with the joining of two diploid gametes that arise because of errors in cell division. The largest known plant genome belongs to the ...
