If you’ve ever grown a houseplant in a dark room, you may have noticed it pointing its leaves toward the nearest window. Plants need sunlight, and they have many strategies to get it when they find themselves stuck in a shady patch. But what happens when other environmental stressors, like soil salinity, are added to the mix? In this week’s edition of Neiler’s Peer Review, I cover a preprint from bioRxiv that explores the topic further.
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References:
Franklin KA, Whitelam GC (2005) Phytochromes and Shade-avoidance Responses in Plants. Ann Bot 96: 169-175
Hayes S et al. (2018) Soil salinity inhibits plant shade avoidance. bioRxiv 289124, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/289124
Schmitt J (1997) Is photomorphogenic shade avoidance adaptive? Perspectives from population biology. Plant Cell Environ 20: 826-830