How do plants achieve their remarkably regular arrangement of leaves and flowers? And why does this pattern remain so stable, ...

Leaf size and venation show remarkable diversity across dicotyledons, and are key determinants of plant adaptation in ecosystems past and present. Here we present global scaling relationships of ...

Miltos Tsiantis and his group from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research want to find out how biological forms develop and the basis for their diversity. The researchers are using thale ...

All leaves develop from tiny buds, which consist of only a few cells. The buds always look the same, no matter what kind of leaf they eventually form. Not only that, but very similar leaf shapes can ...

Most leaves are green due to the pigment chlorophyll, but other colours, such as oranges, reds and blues, may also be present due to less efficient photosynthetic pigments like anthocyanins, carotenes ...

Top: Shape of a plantain lily Hosta lancifola leaf showing the saddle-like shape of the mid-surface and the rippled edges. The researchers dissected the leaves of the plantain lily to show that ...