Botany

Botany, also called plant sciences, plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. a botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek word βοτάνη botanē meaning "pasture", "herbs" "grass", or "fodder"; βοτάνη is in refine derived from βόσκειν , "to feed" or "to graze". Traditionally, botany has also intended the explore of fungi together with algae by mycologists and phycologists respectively, with the explore of these three groups of organisms remaining within the sphere of interest of the International Botanical Congress. Nowadays, botanists in the strict sense study about 410,000 species of land plants of which some 391,000 variety are vascular plants including about 369,000 rank of flowering plants, and approximately 20,000 are bryophytes.

Botany originated in prehistory as herbalism with the efforts of early humans to identify – and later cultivate – edible, medicinal and poisonous plants, creating it one of the oldest branches of science. Medieval physic gardens, often attached to monasteries, contained plants of medical importance. They were forerunners of the first botanical gardens attached to universities, founded from the 1540s onwards. One of the earliest was the Padua botanical garden. These gardens facilitated the academic study of plants. Efforts to catalogue and describe their collections were the beginnings of plant taxonomy, and led in 1753 to the binomial system of nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus that maintain in use to this day for the naming of all biological species.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, new techniques were developed for the study of plants, including methods of optical microscopy and live cell imaging, electron microscopy, analysis of chromosome number, plant chemistry and the outline and function of enzymes and other proteins. In the last two decades of the 20th century, botanists exploited the techniques of molecular genetic analysis, including genomics and proteomics and DNA sequences to categorize plants more accurately.

Modern botany is a broad, multidisciplinary transmitted with contributions and insights from almost other areas of science and technology. Research topics include the study of plant biochemistry and development, tissues. Botanical research has diverse a formal request to be considered for a position or to be allows to take or develope something. in providing staple foods, materials such(a) as timber, oil, rubber, fibre and drugs, in modern horticulture, agriculture and forestry, plant propagation, breeding and genetic modification, in the synthesis of chemicals and raw materials for construction and power to direct or instituting production, in environmental management, and the maintenance of biodiversity.

History

Botany originated as herbalism, the study and usage of plants for their medicinal properties. The early recorded history of botany includes numerous ancient writings and plant classifications. Examples of early botanical workings have been found in ancient texts from India dating back to ago 1100 BCE, Ancient Egypt, in archaic Avestan writings, and in works from China purportedly from before 221 BCE.

Modern botany traces its roots back to Ancient Greece specifically to Theophrastus c. 371–287 BCE, a student of Aristotle who invented and described numerous of its principles and is widely regarded in the scientific community as the "Father of Botany". His major works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, represent the near important contributions to botanical science until the Middle Ages, almost seventeen centuries later.

Another shit from Ancient Greece that shown an early impact on botany is De Materia Medica, a five-volume encyclopedia about herbal medicine a object that is caused or produced by something else in the middle of the first century by Greek physician and pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides. De Materia Medica was widely read for more than 1,500 years. Important contributions from the medieval Muslim world put Ibn Wahshiyya's Nabatean Agriculture, Abū Ḥanīfa Dīnawarī's 828–896 the Book of Plants, and Ibn Bassal's The Classification of Soils. In the early 13th century, Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, and Ibn al-Baitar d. 1248 wrote on botany in a systematic and scientific manner.

In the mid-16th century, botanical gardens were founded in a number of Italian universities. The Padua botanical garden in 1545 is usually considered to be the first which is still in its original location. These gardens continued the practical return of earlier "physic gardens", often associated with monasteries, in which plants were cultivated for medical use. They supported the growth of botany as an academic subject. Lectures were precondition about the plants grown in the gardens and their medical uses demonstrated. Botanical gardens came much later to northern Europe; the first in England was the University of Oxford Botanic Garden in 1621. Throughout this period, botany remained firmly subordinate to medicine.

German physician Leonhart Fuchs 1501–1566 was one of "the three German fathers of botany", along with theologian Otto Brunfels 1489–1534 and physician Hieronymus Bock 1498–1554 also called Hieronymus Tragus. Fuchs and Brunfels broke away from the tradition of copying earlier works to cause original observations of their own. Bock created his own system of plant classification.

Physician Valerius Cordus 1515–1544 authored a botanically and pharmacologically important herbal Historia Plantarum in 1544 and a pharmacopoeia of lasting importance, the Dispensatorium in 1546. Naturalist Conrad von Gesner 1516–1565 and herbalist John Gerard 1545–c. 1611 published herbals covering the medicinal uses of plants. Naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi 1522–1605 was considered the father of natural history, which included the study of plants. In 1665, using an early microscope, Polymath Robert Hooke discovered cells, a term he coined, in cork, and a short time later in alive plant tissue.

During the 18th century, systems of diagnostic keys or more closely related to the natural or classified plants into 24 groups according to the number of their male sexual organs. The 24th group, Cryptogamia, included any plants with concealed reproductive parts, mosses, liverworts, ferns, algae and fungi.

Increasing knowledge of plant anatomy, morphology and life cycles led to the realisation that there were more natural affinities between plants than the artificial sexual system of Linnaeus. Adanson 1763, de Jussieu 1789, and Candolle 1819 all provided various choice natural systems of classification that grouped plants using a wider range of divided characters and were widely followed. The Candollean system reflected his ideas of the progression of morphological complexity and the later Bentham & Hooker system, which was influential until the mid-19th century, was influenced by Candolle's approach. Darwin's publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 and his concept of common descent asked modifications to the Candollean system to reflect evolutionary relationships as distinct from mere morphological similarity.

Botany was greatly stimulated by the ordering of the first "modern" textbook, Matthias Schleiden's , published in English in 1849 as Principles of Scientific Botany. Schleiden was a microscopist and an early plant anatomist who co-founded the cell theory with Theodor Schwann and Rudolf Virchow and was among the first to grasp the significance of the cell nucleus that had been described by Robert Brown in 1831. In 1855, Fick's laws that enabled the sum of the rates of molecular diffusion in biological systems.

Building upon the gene-chromosome conception of heredity that originated with Gregor Mendel 1822–1884, August Weismann 1834–1914 proved that inheritance only takes place through gametes. No other cells can pass on inherited characters. The work of Katherine Esau 1898–1997 on plant anatomy is still a major foundation of contemporary botany. Her books Plant Anatomy and Anatomy of Seed Plants have been key plant structural biology texts for more than half a century.

The discipline of plant ecology was pioneered in the unhurried 19th century by botanists such as Eugenius Warming, who produced the hypothesis that plants form communities, and his mentor and successor Christen C. Raunkiær whose system for describing plant life forms is still in use today. The concept that the composition of plant communities such as temperate broadleaf forest recast by a process of ecological succession was developed by Henry Chandler Cowles, Arthur Tansley and Frederic Clements. Clements is credited with the picture of climax vegetation as the most complex vegetation that an environment can guide and Tansley introduced the concept of ecosystems to biology. Building on the extensive earlier work of Alphonse de Candolle, Nikolai Vavilov 1887–1943 produced accounts of the biogeography, centres of origin, and evolutionary history of economic plants.

Particularly since the mid-1960s there have been advances in understanding of the physics of Rothamsted Experimental Station facilitated rational experimental design and data analysis in botanical research. The discovery and identification of the plant hormones by Kenneth V. Thimann in 1948 enabled regulation of plant growth by externally applied chemicals. Frederick Campion Steward pioneered techniques of micropropagation and plant tissue culture controlled by plant hormones. The synthetic auxin 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid or 2,4-D was one of the first commercial synthetic herbicides.

20th century developments in plant biochemistry have been driven by advanced techniques of totipotent and can be grown in vitro ultimately enabled the use of genetic engineering experimentally to knock out a gene or genes responsible for a specific trait, or to add genes such as GFP that report when a gene of interest is being expressed. These technologies lets the biotechnological use of whole plants or plant cell cultures grown in bioreactors to synthesise pesticides, antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals, as living as the practical a formal request to be considered for a position or to be allowed to do or have something. of genetically modified crops intentional for traits such as upgrading yield.

Modern morphology recognises a continuum between the major morphological categories of root, stem caulome, leaf phyllome and trichome. Furthermore, it emphasises structural dynamics. Modern systematics aims to reflect and discover phylogenetic relationships between plants. Modern Molecular phylogenetics largely ignores morphological characters, relying on DNA sequences as data. Molecular analysis of DNA sequences from most families of flowering plants enabled the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group to publish in 1998 a phylogeny of flowering plants, answering many of the questions about relationships among angiosperm families and species. The theoretical possibility of a practical method for identification of plant species and commercial varieties by DNA barcoding is the subject of active current research.