The plant hormone ethylene is one of the central regulators of plant development and stress resistance. Optimal ethylene signaling is essential for plant fitness and is under strong selection pressure. Plants upregulate ethylene production in response to stress, and this hormone triggers defense mechanisms. Due to the pleiotropic effects of ethylene, adjusting stress responses to maximize resis...

10 Short title: 11 Light signaling, root development and plasticity 12 13 Corresponding author: Prof. Dr. Ronald Pierik, [email protected], Plant Ecophysiology, Utrecht 14 University. Padualaan 8, 3584CH Utrecht, the Netherlands 15 16 17 Author contributions: K.v.G., C.K. and R.P. wrote the manuscript and composed the figures. 18 19 Funding Information 20 K.v.G. is funded by the Netherlands Organi...

For many years it has been known that plants perform rapid long-distance signalling using classical action potentials that have impacts on diverse processes in plants. Plants also synthesize numerous neuronal molecules and fulfill some criteria for intelligent behaviour. Analysis of recent breakthrough data from ecophysiology studies has revealed that plant roots can discriminate between 'self'...

Recently, a number of publications have reported that many physiological properties of vascular epiphytes are a function of plant size. This short review will summarize what is known to date about this phenomenon, describe the possible mechanism and will discuss the consequences for the present understanding of epiphyte biology. Size-related changes are also known from other plant groups and it...

All plants in natural ecosystems appear to be symbiotic with fungal endophytes. This highly diverse group of fungi can have profound impacts on plant communities through increasing fitness by conferring abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, increasing biomass and decreasing water consumption, or decreasing fitness by altering resource allocation. Despite more than 100 yr of research resulting in...

Selective pressures acting on plant life histories can drive extreme specialization. One example of such specialization is the evolution of dioecious breeding systems. Evolutionary and ecological theory posits that dioecy may subject male and female individuals to different selective pressures and result in unique sex-mediated adaptive traits related to resource allocation and ecophysiology. Cy...

Abstract The response of herbivorous insects to plant drought stress can range from positive negative, and it has been challenging understand the causes this variation. We tested whether trait values associated with aridity gradients might underlie variation how such effects vary between two insect feeding guilds. Here, we propose that plants adaptation arid environments would result in experim...