I don't know much about the growing restrictions, distribution, and market for Papaver somniferum, but I question whether the barrier really is not having high-yielding varieties. More potent plants would also be highly restricted in some countries but then again, countries that do permit growing would supposedly make up for the difference in what's needed.

Check out this article on BIAs:

Benzylisoquinoline Alkaloid Metabolism: A Century of Discovery and a Brave New World

https://academic.oup.com/pcp/article/54/5/647/1853904

BIAs are in a lot of different plants and have been used by humans for a long time!

How are fatty acids related to secondary metabolite production? Are metabolites stored in fats, or are more fatty acids needed for more vesicles which store metabolites?

transcriptomics: what genes are turned on at different developmental times or in different tissues

Here's an argument for preserving biodiversity. Even when primarily domesticated plants (or synthetic phytochemicals) are used as medicine, the wild varieties still contain the original, whole genome. Agricultural varieties have had diversity bred out of them.

How recent? Does this have anything to do with human breeding efforts?

Interesting! Grow microbes in our waste, then use them to make our medicine. Though this seems like so many extra steps than just using traditional sources. It's like the factory farming of the medical world.

a kind of wormwood, also called Sweet Annie, it can be grown around here.

Also found in bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, native to eastern North America

Or maybe they can be more dynamic if they are not tied to primary processes.

I like this word, bioprospecting. It's like fishing, throwing in a line and seeing what you get.

For example, finding common plants that have the same metabolites as rarer medicinal plants. Invasive barberry contains berberine just like the overharvested native goldenseal.

So they're talking about the importance of moving away from using the plants themselves for medicine and instead synthetically engineering the metabolites. Some issues I see with this is that it moves the profit to technological/pharmaceutical corporations and away from farmers/breeders, allowing patents and exclusivity, and negates the need to protect land and biodiversity. Many plant medicines are most effective when used whole instead of broken down to their strongest active ingredients because multiple metabolites can balance each other. Though maybe this omics method can help identify the multiple constinuents of a plant that are crucial for making a balanced medicine.

Wow, in selfing species there can be an effective population size of one

I was curious about what this is describing. It's a "measure of the extent of population subdivision as inferred from allele frequencies at microsatellite loci" as described in this paper: https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/139/1/457/6013188?login=true

What would be used if they were comparing between different species? Nonpolymorphic loci? Or it would have to be loci that were polymorphic between species not within species?

I wonder how many plants are held by collectors?

I question this assumption. These populations may have moved and changed just as much as those at higher elevations.

Ooooo, so much to do in R!

Could this be because more observations were made in these more highly populated states?

Like predators that rely on a limited prey species. They may not be specialist-pollinators but are specialist-pollinator-specialists.

where species or plant groupings (in some cases scores of species) achieve their maximum range limits either latitudinally or longitudinally

So this cell lives inside of the other cell? Neat!

So this must mean that the last common ancestor of gymnosperms and angiosperms did have motile sperm.

Pollen floats on the water's surface, called surface hydrophily. There are a few plants that pollinate underwater, but mostly it happens on the water surface to floating plants.

I was curious if there were any animal-pollinated gymnosperms. Apparently yes, partially at least. Pollination drops (bits of liquid that move the pollen in towards the ovule) can be a sweet attractant, like the nectar of flowers. One paper called them 'sexual fluids'!

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.01844/full

Ok, I had to look this up. I had previously been taught about dicots vs. monocots, which are morphologically descriptive terms, but not phylogenetic terms. Eudicots do not include the magnoliids even though they are morphologically dicots.

Their geographic distribution model (Figure 5) does show a low likelihood of climatic suitability in other areas. Microclimates might be difficult to assess in these broad-scale models.

I'm confused by the order in which these are presented: If they want to show future to past, wouldn't it be "2070, Current, LGM, then LIG"? I'm thinking that the last interglacial (LIG) came before the last glacial maximum (LGM). Unless they mean the current LIG that we are in, but that would be Current. Does that make sense?

Allen et al. found that the rarest haplotypes in western North America were south of the where the ice sheets ended (Montana, Washington, California, Utah, Arizona). These areas were colder and better habitat for Sibbaldia during the glacial period, and now they are confined to higher mountains.

Tectonic uplift and mountains make a diversity of habitats and microclimates.

Though there may have been great differentiation during other periods and there could be no trace of it if those different plants/haplotypes have gone extinct.

last interglacial

last glacial maximum

The latest report of the International Panel on Climate Change uses models to predict future climate scenarios.

million years ago

"the geographical separation of a population, typically by a physical barrier such as a mountain range or river, resulting in a pair of closely related species."

Spacer DNA is noncoding DNA between genes. Introns are noncoding DNA within genes.

Timberline is where commercial timber ceases to grow. Treeline is where trees cease to grow. So krummholz would be above timberline but below treeline. Should krummholz communities have been included in this study?

How is leaf lifespan known?

reproducing once in a lifetime

Right, why have a nucleus if you're not going to reproduce?

That's amazing and I wonder what the longest living kind of cell is.

The parichnos just happen to be exposed to the external environment with leaf abscission, but that's not their function.

I think what they're saying here is that perhaps juveniles did not die as frequently as adults, so wouldn't be in the fossil record. That suggests to me that these plants were pretty successful if they mostly all made it to maturity.

Yes, how did these plants affect climate? They are pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it away in the soil, so that would cool the climate.

New word for me! "(of a fact or circumstance) be a powerful or conclusive factor in preventing"

male / microspore, female / megaspore

Perhaps transitional plants are less fit or they evolved quickly to vascular plants which then outcompeted their predecessors.

I love the physics involved in these dispersal processes.

See https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/59/6/1525/5511832

Absorbs or "eats" the gametophyte?

Do the neck canal cells break down when the egg is "ripe"? And do they stay in place to keep the egg from getting fertilized at the wrong time?

Sterile meaning non-reproductive (not meaning clean!)

Does this also mean that the gametophyte would express deleterious traits if it was stuck with the "bad half" (n) of the diploid organism's (2n) genes? Would those genes be less likely to be passed on to the gametes if the gametophyte was less fit with those recessive genes?

Allows the organism to get bigger. It may use more energy but may get stronger. Maybe the benefit of growing out a sporophyte is that more gametes can then be produced than the single-cell zygote can.

Several of these peptide fold enrichment sites are actually higher for Viscum than Arabidopsis. I would like more explanation for why this could be. It makes sense that glycolytic process would be higher since the CO2 isotope analysis suggests Viscum changed its metabolism from TCA to gylcolysis. However, the TCA fold enrichment is even higher for Viscum than Arabidopsis. This is conflicting.

Strong words like these in papers always grab my attention. My first thought is "how is this more important than a lot of other things in the world?" BUT in context, the authors are implying that if we want to know more about parasitic plant mitochondria, then phylogenomics should be the immediate next thing to study.

It would be interesting to look into this. File this under future directions of study. How common is it for mitochondrial genes to be transferred to the nucleus?

Being able to sense both blue and red light with one photoreceptor seems beneficial and I wonder why this wasn't carried on to the later-diverging land plants. Perhaps it's better to have two different photoreceptors to allow for specific functions in a more complex organism?

Plants are concerned not just with visible light (visible to humans, that is)

This is something I never considered: that there was a time when plants did not compete with each other for light.

I always thought of Gaia theory as more of a feedback loop. The environment changes and biota adapt which then changes the environment, on and on. As soon as biota push conditions to the edge of what's sustainable for life, biota changes its course not because it desires to, but because of the tenets of evolution.

"Genetic architecture refers to the underlying genetic basis of a phenotypic trait. A synonymous term is the ‘genotype-phenotype map’, the way that genotypes map to the phenotypes." Wikipedia

I was not previously considering resource dependence as plasticity, though I suppose it is. So if a human mother does not get adequate nutrition during gestation and her baby has low birth weight, that is an example of plasticity?

Read Richard Prum's book, "The Evolution of Beauty" for debunking of this hypothesis.

This is counter to what I've read while researching for my proposal: polyploid plants are more successful in novel or extreme environments. Benefit of genome size is dependent on environment.

I don't think we can really know the limits to plasticity for any one species unless we submit them to novel and/or extreme environments.The limit IS the environment.

Yes, sexual selection may affect limits to plasticity. This force could pull in a different direction.

This infers that plasticity itself is a phenotype with fixation of traits as the opposing phenotype.

This is a neat idea similar to patients freezing their sperm or eggs prior to undergoing cancer treatments that may kill the gametes.

This sentence probably shouldn't be in here twice...

I'm sure I'm overlooking something that the medical professionals have more experience with, but this sounds like an oxymoron.

Gestation in mice is 20 days, so 5 days prior to birth is 25% of the total gestation. Compare to 25% of human gestation which is 67 days. This may not be how you would correlate this mice study to humans, but is something to consider.

...pthalates, PFAS, BPA, plastics, hormones, medications, the list goes on and on...

This is essentially correlating overweight with gut bacteria.

I imagine that feeding off the breast would also introduce bacteria to the baby's gut.

Well, thank goodness, otherwise we would never keep pace!

Where is Table S1?

There is a fourth scenario that is missing which is an instance of non-genetically differentiated subpopulations occupying similar ecological habitat where we would expect that genetic and epigenetic differentiation will be similar.

This is an interesting concept relevant to my thesis. In these cases, are the plants in need of variation or are they just genetically well-suited for a specific environment, ie, recently disturbed land?

I wonder to what extent epigenetics can be used in phylogeny, to trace the relationships among individual plants?

This is highly relevant to plant conservation because a build-up of heritable epimutations can lead to more diversity, and more quickly accrued diversity, than in genetics alone.

Then do mammals NOT experience epigenetic inheritance?

There could be other factors involved in the development of queens. Silencing the the methyltransferase doesn't explain the process complete.

The populations had variation, but can we say the variation was adaptive? Are epigenetic changes allowing the fish to live in water of differing pH or is pH causing the epigenetic changes?

Re: correlation. This selection may have increased the prevalence of a phenotype, but we don't know if an epigenetic difference will cause a change 100% of the time. What is going on with those individuals who's coat color did not change? This is also an example of "messiness" of epigenetics.

This is an example of epigenetics not being a silver bullet. Methylation was not shown to cause a predictable response.

Without knowing the study this comes from, we don't know if the correlation means that browsing caused a prickly phenotype or if there is something about a prickly phenotype that invites (is more delicious to) herbivores.

Sound like the definition of ecology to me.

Outreach IS integrative when it allows a back-and-forth among stakeholders. Maybe outreach is what should be added to all sciences in order to make them integrative, as long as it's not a one-way street approach, like disseminating research findings to the public/other disciplines and not taking feedback or taking feedback seriously.

This is interesting because I usually see "expertise" as something that becomes narrower and more specific.