As The Cold Sets In, Keep Nature Indoors

This time of year, the air becomes cooler, the leaves turn and nature begins a long wintry slumber.

But if you're like me, you'll miss all the green and color of abundant plant life of summer. Planters are a perfect solution to bring all that flora inside to appreciate even as the temperate dips outside.

Indoor Planters and and Decorative Planters not only keep your plants alive, but you can find a type of planter that also add to your current decor -- and even bring their own flair to your home.

Click on these links to browse planters available online, that can be delivered right to your home for your planting. That saves wear and tear on your back.

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Planters, An Easy Way To A Green Thumb

Whether you live in an apartment, townhome, single family residence, or wherever, plants and flowers around your home add color and value.

However, maybe you don't have time to do all of the yardwork required -- maybe you just don't like doing it. Planters may be a good alternative for you, in that case. You avoid all of the yard-digging, weeds, rocks, etc.

Whether you use Outdoor Planters, Window Box Planters, or another type, you just buy the plants you want, some good quality potting soil and you avoid a lot of headaches.

Plus, with planters, you can bring your plants and flowers in for the cold weather and enjoy them all year 'round. Check out the links above for an assortment of different planters. You will likely find one or more that suit your needs and probably also add to your home decor, inside and out.

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Plants With More Vitamin C May Result From University Discovery

UCLA and Dartmouth scientists have identified a crucial enzyme in plant vitamin C synthesis, which could lead to enhanced crops. The discovery now makes clear the entire 10-step process by which plants convert glucose into vitamin C, an important antioxidant in nature.

"If we can find ways to enhance the activity of this enzyme, it may be possible to engineer plants to make more vitamin C and produce better crops," says Steven Clarke, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry, director of UCLA's Molecular Biology Institute and co-author of the research study, to be published as a 'Paper of the Week' in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and currently available online.

"We hit on gold," Clarke says, "because we now have a chance to improve human nutrition and to increase the resistance of plants to oxidative stress. Plants may grow better with more vitamin C, especially with more ozone in the atmosphere due to pollution."

Carole Linster, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow in chemistry and biochemistry and lead author of the study, discovered the controlling enzyme, GDP-L-galactose phosphorylase, which serves as the biosynthetic pathway by which plants manufacture vitamin C.

"Our finding leads to attractive approaches for increasing the vitamin C content in plants," Linster says. "We now have two strategies to provide enhanced protection against oxidative damage: Stimulate the endogenous activity of the identified enzyme or engineer transgenic plants which overexpress the gene that encodes the enzyme."

When life on Earth began, there was almost no oxygen, Clarke notes.

"Two billion years ago, plants devised an efficient way to get sunlight to make sugar from carbon dioxide that produced oxygen as a waste product; that waste product probably killed off most of all living species at that time," Clarke says. "The only organisms that survived developed defenses against it, and one of the best defenses is vitamin C. Plants learned how to make vitamin C to protect themselves."

Prior to the new research, vitamin C may have been the most important small molecule whose biosynthetic pathway remained a mystery.

An essential vitamin for humans, vitamin C is also an important antioxidant for animals and plants. Humans do not have the ability to make vitamin C and get it from dietary sources, especially from plants. It was not until 1998 that a biosynthetic pathway was proposed to explain how plants make this compound. Research confirmed much of the pathway, although one crucial missing link continued to baffle scientists and remained unknown until this new research.

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Landscaping: Earth, Life In Harmony

With the coming of Earth Day, it is natural we are thinking of the environment.

Why not bring your environment and your life into harmony with Landscape Design?

SLDA Landscape Design Associates create designs that bring value to your home with its Three SteppingStone process. They build a landscape that fits, not just yourproperty, but yours and your family’s personalities.

"It's important that you have confidence in the people who design your landscape. I have built a team of highly creative people, but what makes us different is-we create solutions based on your vision of your property--not ours," says SLDA Principal Tony Bernstein. "This is why you'll find I am often in the role of being your biggest advocate. And you'll always have direct access to me. I love to challenge our designers, I also insist that the finished product represent beauty and functionality in a way that reflects your family's personalities and the personality of the land itself."

Visit the SLDA website and take the landscaping survey today!

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Feds Fund Research on 'Economically Important Plants'

Scientists will find improved ways of studying the structure, function and evolution of the genomes of economically important plants, thanks to $14 million in new awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).

Resources to be developed include genomic sequences, genetic markers, maps and expressed sequence collections. These are much-needed tools for researchers working in areas as diverse as genome evolution and plant breeding.

Awardees will address scientific questions including the role of polyploidy in genome evolution, the genomic basis of speciation, and the relationships between cultivated plants and their weedy relatives.

"If the Plant Genome Research Program has been making the bricks that build a conceptual framework for the genomes of economically important crop plants, these projects will provide the mortar," says James Collins, NSF assistant director for biological sciences. "The impact of genomics in evolutionary, ecological and population studies of crop plants will be far-reaching."

Many crop plants have large, complex genomes that in some cases are "polyploid" -- containing multiple genomes. Polyploidy is widespread in plants and animals, and can lead to dramatic changes in gene content and genome organization that are only just beginning to be understood.
A project led by researchers at Iowa State University will develop sequence and map resources to study polyploidy in cotton, while researchers at the University of Missouri will look at the impact of polyploidy on plant form in Brassica species, which includes plants such as canola and Brussels sprouts. Other projects at the University of Georgia and the University of Arizona will develop sequence resources to study genome organization in wheat and rice.

The outcomes from these projects will allow researchers to understand how extra copies of genes function in these plants, and how genomes from different sources can work together in a single plant.

The ever-growing collection of genome sequences is shedding light on the variation between individuals within a species. For example, in a forest of trees or a field of corn, there may be many versions of a particular gene, each with minor sequence differences. These sequence differences can sometimes have dramatic effects on growth and development.

Projects based at the University of California at Davis and Cornell University will catalog variants in pine trees and in maize, respectively, to allow researchers to link genetic variation with changes in gene function. This information could have applications in plant breeding.
More than half of the world's most cultivated crops have relatives that are invasive weeds, competing with the crop for nutrients and water and leading to reduced yields.

One example is red rice, a weedy form of rice that reduces the yields of cultivated rice by as much as 80 percent and contaminating harvests with its small red-coated grains. A project led by researchers at Washington University St. Louis will examine the regions of the red rice genome associated with weediness to find out whether it originated from the domesticated crop or if it was introduced as a weed from Asia.

A related project led by investigators at Michigan State University will investigate differences in gene expression in weedy and cultivated radishes to uncover which genes are associated with invasiveness.The outcomes of these projects could lead to a great understanding of how plants become weedy and invasive, and yield possible avenues for better selective control of weeds, scientists believe.

"The outcomes of this new program will tie together studies of the evolution of gene structure, function and regulation across the whole plant kingdom," says Collins.

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