Bamboo Coaxed to Flower in Lab(2011/08/30)
    In a significant advance for the cultivation of one of the world's most important timber and fodder crops, scientists say they have coaxed bamboo plants to flower in the laboratory, a feat never before managed. Bamboo in the field can take more than a century to flower and produce seeds. The new technique will allow botanists to breed a better version of a plant that has undergirded the economies and cultures of Asia and many tropical nations for hundreds or even thousands of years. And it should allow faster replacement of depleted bamboo forests that are vitally needed.
   This is a spectacular success for the breeding of bamboo, said David Hanke, a botanist at the University of Cambridge and the author of an editorial that accompanied the report being published today in the journal Nature. It's a breakthrough that could have real significance for a quarter of the world's population.
    In many Western nations, bamboo is viewed largely as ornamental foliage. But in China, India, Japan, Malaysia, parts of Latin America and other regions where bamboo is abundant, it provides a vital source of lightweight, rot-resistant wood for houses, smaller public buildings, furniture and even the scaffolding that is used in the building of skyscrapers and supertankers.
    Bamboo reeds are crafted into musical instruments, artists' tools, baskets and domestic goods of all kinds. They are pulverized for paper pulp. With four times the protein of other fodder grasses, bamboo hay is a dietary staple for livestock.
   In those regions where bamboo is common, the plant is a godsend,'said Beecher Crampton, professor emeritus of agronomy at the University of California at Davis. It's hard to overstate its importance.The new technique should allow botanists to fashion novel hybrids of bamboo that will grow faster, resist diseases and yield a stronger, more versatile wood. Botanists say the technique could allow rapid reforestation of regions where bamboo stands have been depleted or devastated, either through human encroachment or as a result of the natural mass dying cycle that all bamboo forests undergo.
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