Laura is a science news writer, covering a wide variety of subjects, but she is particularly fascinated by all things aquatic, paleontology, nanotechnology, and exploring how science influences daily life. Laura is a proud former resident of the New Jersey shore, a competitive swimmer, and a fierce defender of the Oxford comma.
As Earth rotates and the sun moves across the sky from east to west, sunflowers turn their brilliant yellow faces to follow it. The mechanics behind this process, called heliotropism, is still a mystery to plant biologists. A study published October 31 in the journal PLOS Biology likely rules out that a sunflower’s ability to follow the sun is related to a more well-known response to light that all plants follow.
Stacey Harmer/UC Davis. “We’ve been continually surprised by what we’ve found as we study how sunflowers follow the sun each day,” study co-author and University of California, Davis plant biologist Stacey Harmer said in a statement. “In this paper, we report that they use different molecular pathways to initiate and maintain tracking movements, and that the photoreceptors best known for causing plant bending seem to play a minor role in this remarkable process.
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