The blade of grass mystery It is one of those enigmas that drives scientists crazy for years for being apparently simple, but not having a clear explanation with the knowledge available to science. Although in this case it is even more bizarre; since, according to a study that has just been published in Science, actually the solution was there, right under our noses, for more than a century.
The 19th century botanists They gave an explanation to the mystery that was soon discarded in the following century. But now, thanks to a team of scientists from the John Innes Center, Cornell University, the University of California and the University of Edinburgh, we know they were right.
Let’s see what these were saying 19th century scientists, but before that, let’s get to the most important thing. What does the mystery of the blade of grass say?
The blade that never ends
It doesn’t matter how much we cut the grass or weed. Blade of grass will grow back quickly, almost by magic. The same is true in the fields where livestock are fed. But it is not magic, logically. It is science.
The problem is that for years it has been an unknown science. For scientists it has been a great mystery to understand how these plants can recover so quickly from the harvest.
Theories have been proposed, but the deeper knowledge of botany has led to them gradually being discarded. Although not all were rightly scrapped.
Reasonable resemblances behind the blade of grass mystery
Before knowing the solution to the mystery of the blade of grass, it is important to have some basic notions about plant classification.
Broadly speaking, flowering plants are divided into monocots and eudicots.
The first, among which are the grasses Like wheat and other plants known as herbs, they are characterized by the presence of leaves that surround the stem at the base. And also by parallel veins in all its parts. As for the eudicotyledons, among which we can find legumes or some garden shrubs, its leaves are kept away from the stem, but attached to it through a kind of corner, known as petiole.
But, going back to grasses, in them those leaves at the base form a kind of pod, which protects the growing tip from cattle teeth or the blades of brush cutters and lawn mowers. This is what is known. The mystery was at the origin of that structure. Could it be related to the eudicotyledons?
That was what the scientists of the 19th century were proposing. That the sheath of some is equivalent to the petiole of the other. However, in the twentieth century, plant anatomists observed that petioles have parallel veins and posited as more plausible that it was actually the entire blade of grass, except for a small region at its tip, which was derived from the petiole.
To find out which was the most realistic option, the authors of this recent study used the latest knowledge from developmental genetics and computational modeling. Using both tools, they modeled the different options that have been raised for centuries and compared them with the experimental results. The hypothetical option that best matched the real life It turned out to be the one that was raised in the 19th century and was discarded in the 20th.
Therefore, that common origin in both structures would be the one that gave the herbs the superpower to grow at a dizzying rate. Great news for cows. Bad for gardeners on golf courses.