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Flower on order

 Flower on order genetic tinkering can produce plants that can be made to bloom as and when required. Doused with the correct chemical trigger, they spring into bloom within days. George Coupland and his colleagues at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, say that if plants could be persuaded to flower as and when required, farmers would be able to control the time of the harvest of their crops and flower growers could produce a continuous supply of blooms ( New Scientist , Vol 155, No 2090).

Coupland's cooperative weeds are an offshoot of a growing body of knowledge about the process of flowering. In the past few years, researchers have pieced together a map of the genes that link flowering to environmental signals. They have identified a genetic switch that determines whether a bud turns into a flower or a normal shoot. They have even begun to understand how plants choose where flowers will appear on the shoot. The fruits of this research

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