Short Description: Study of pine pollen reveals nanofoams are key to survive mass extinctions
Study of pine pollen reveals nanofoams are key to survive mass extinctions
London [UK], February 9 : The past always has always intrigued scientists, whether be it searching for answers on survival or questioning the existence of some species. Scientists from the Natural History Museum, London (United Kingdom), and the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, Grenoble (France), have found that some pollen has survived mass extinctions thanks, in part, to its nanofoam wall structure. This had the key to explain the survival of certain plants.
It was the first time that scientists described a biological nanofoam structure. Their results were published in 'Science Advances'.
Pollen grains protected plant's genetic material from environmental threats during reproduction and are therefore vital to the survival of plants. For this purpose, the earliest land plants evolved a tough outer wall of their pollen grains, produced from a highly resistant organic polymer, known as sporopollenin.
Thanks to this shield, plants like conifer trees, which have been around for 300-400 million years, survived several mass extinctions, including the one that wiped out dinosaurs, at the end of the Cretaceous. Now, the scientists have found out how conifer pollen has adapted, thanks to experiments carried out at the ESRF.
A team of scientists from the ESRF and the Natural History Museum (NHM), including palynologists, material scientists and physicists, joined forces to discover the pollen wall's secrets. They chose to analyse conifer pollen as it has a longer evolutionary history than that of flowering plant pollen and could be compared very effectively with fossil material from the NHM collections.
( Details and picture courtesy ANI, the content is auto-generated from the feed.)
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