Author
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McCormick, Sheila |
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Submitted to: Bioessays
Publication Type: Review Article Publication Acceptance Date: 4/20/2007 Publication Date: 5/1/2007 Citation: McCormick, S.M. 2007. Seed to Seed, The Secret Life of Plants. Bioessays. 29(5):504-505. Interpretive Summary: Technical Abstract: This is a book review of "Seed to Seed, The Secret Life of Plants", by Nicholas Harberd. The book is a diary of ruminations/introspections about plant development and about the main research topic of Nick Harberd’s laboratory. His intended audience is initially nonscientists; many of the explanations come about from questions his children ask him about what he does at work. The story started in the 1990s, when his lab studied an Arabidopsis mutant called gai, a plant hormone that causes plants to grow. As the year proceeds, Harberd manages to cover in some depth almost all aspects of what is happening in the plant. The text is interspersed with very nice hand-drawn diagrams, not only to illustrate various features of the plant life cycle and structure, but also to explain different experimental treatments and the predicted outcomes of the manipulations. |
