Related Concept Videos
02:45Biological Clocks and Seasonal Responses
The circadian—or biological—clock is an intrinsic, timekeeping, molecular mechanism that allows plants to coordinate physiological activities over 24-hour cycles called circadian rhythms. Photoperiodism is a collective term for the biological responses of plants to variations in the relative lengths of dark and light periods. The period of light-exposure is called the photoperiod.
02:00Photoreceptors and Plant Responses to Light
Light plays a significant role in regulating the growth and development of plants. In addition to providing energy for photosynthesis, light provides other important cues to regulate a range of developmental and physiological responses in plants.
01:50Global Climate Change
Throughout its ~4.5 billion year history, the Earth has experienced periods of warming and cooling. However, the current drastic increase in global temperatures is well outside of the Earth’s cyclic norms, and evidence for human-caused global climate change is compelling. Paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climate conditions, provides ample evidence for human-caused global climate change by comparing recent conditions with those in the past.
02:16Light Acquisition
In order to produce glucose, plants need to capture sufficient light energy. Many modern plants have evolved leaves specialized for light acquisition. Leaves can be only millimeters in width or tens of meters wide, depending on the environment. Due to competition for sunlight, evolution has driven the evolution of increasingly larger leaves and taller plants, to avoid shading by their neighbors with contaminant elaboration of root architecture and mechanisms to transport water and nutrients.
02:45Responses to Heat and Cold Stress
Every organism has an optimum temperature range within which healthy growth and physiological functioning can occur. At the ends of this range, there will be a minimum and maximum temperature that interrupt biological processes.
02:36Meristems and Plant Growth
Plants grow throughout their lives; this is called indeterminate growth, and it distinguishes plants from most animals. Although certain parts of plants stop growing (e.g., leaves and flowers), others grow continuously—like roots and stems.
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Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 10, 2026
08:42
Forced Flowering in Mandarin Trees under Phytotron Conditions
Published on: March 6, 2019
Warming, photoperiods, and tree phenology
Science (New York, N.Y.)
|July 22, 2010
Summary
No abstract available in PubMed .
