License: Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA
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Author(s): George M. Briggs
Inanimate Life is an open textbook covering a very traditional biological topic, botany, in a non-traditional way. Rather than a phylogenetic approach, going group by group, the book considers what defines organisms and examines four general areas of their biology: structure (their composition and how it comes to be), reproduction (including sex), energy and material needs, and their interactions with conditions and with other organisms. Although much of the text is devoted to vascular plants, the book comparatively considers ‘EBA = everything but animals’ (hence the title): plants, photosynthetic organisms that are not plants (‘algae’, as well as some bacteria and archaebacteria), fungi, and ‘fungal-like’ organisms. The book includes brief ‘fact sheets’ of over fifty organisms/groups that biologists should be aware of, ranging from the very familiar (corn, yeast) to the unfamiliar (bracket fungi, late-blight of potato). These groups reflect the diversity of inanimate life.
Chapter 2: Taxonomy and Phylogeny
Chapter 4: Organism form: composition, size, and shape
Chapter 5: Cellular Structure in Inanimate Life
Chapter 6: Organ, Tissue, and Cellular Structure of Plants
Chapter 7: Producing Form: Development
Chapter 8: Vascular plant anatomy: primary growth
Chapter 10: Vascular Plant Form
Chapter 11: Reproduction and sex
Chapter 12: Fungal sex and fungal groups
Chapter 13: Sex and reproduction in non-seed plants
Chapter 14: The Development of Seeds
Chapter 15: Sex and Reproduction in Seed Plants
Chapter 16: Reproduction: development and physiology
Chapter 17: Sex, evolution, and the biological species concept
Chapter 18: Matter, Energy and Organisms
Chapter 19: Cellular Respiration
Chapter 21: Metabolic diversity
Chapter 22: Nutrition and nutrients
Chapter 24: Material movement and diffusion’s multiple roles in plant biology
Chapter 25: Plant growth—patterns, limitations and models
Chapter 26: Interactions Involving Conditions
Chapter 27: Biotic Interactions
Chapter 29: Weeds and weed control
Chapter 30: Threats to agriculture: insects and pathogens
Chapter 31: Propagating plants and developing new plants
Organisms
Acetabularia, an unusual unicellular green algae
Agaricus bisporus, the commercial mushroom
Calupera, a large coenocytic green algae.
Chlamydomonas, a small unicellular green alga
Coccolithophores, photosynthetic unicellular algae
Corralorhiza, a plant that eats fungi
Cryptomonads, unicellular photosynthetic algae
Diatoms, unicellular photosynthetic algae
Dictyostelium: a cellular slime mold
Glomeromycota: important mycorrhizal fungi
Horsetails, the genus Equisetum
Kelp: Laminaria, a brown algae
Lungwort lichen (Lobaria pumonaria)
Marchantia: thalloid liverwort
Marsilea: the 4-leaf clover fern
Nostoc: the smallest multicellular organism
Oedogonium: a filamentous green algae
Physarum: a plasmodial slime mold
Redwoods: the tallest and largest trees
Rhizobium: nitrogen fixing bacteria
Rust fungi (order Pucciniales, formerly Uredinales)
