and compared the genome sequences of ten diverse citrus varieties including sweet and sour orange along with several important mandarin and pummelo cultivars.
Comparing sequences of so-called traditional mandarins such as the Asian cultivar Ponkan and the Mediterranean cultivar Willowleaf with mandarins known to be developed hybrids indicated that all contain segments of the pummelo genome.
The wild Mangshan mandarin from China is an exception to the rule as its genome revealed it was in fact a separate species from other cultivated mandarins.
They found that tropical forests absorb almost two billion tonnes of carbon each year equivalent to one-fifth of the world's carbon emissions by storing it in their bark leaves and soil.
The researchers have discovered a pair of proteins made by flowering plants that are vital for the production of the sperm present within each pollen grain.
Scientists already knew that flowering plants in contrast to animals require not one but two sperm cells for successful fertilisation:
one to join with the egg cell to produce the embryo and one to join with a second cell to produce the nutrient-rich endosperm inside the seed.
Interestingly DAZ1 and DAZ2 perform their role by cooperating with a well-known'repressor'protein called TOPLESS that acts as a brake on unwanted gene activity that would otherwise halt sperm and seed production.
and allows forests to store more carbon dioxideevery spring as the weather warms trees in forests up and down the east coast explode in a bright green display of life as leaves fill their branches
Termites, fungi play more important role in decomposition than temperatureclimate change models could have a thing
and fungi according to a new study released this week. For a long time scientists have believed that temperature is the dominant factor in determining the rate of wood decomposition worldwide.
But scientists from Yale the University of Central Florida and SUNY Buffalo State found that fungi
and biology of fungi and termites is a key to understanding how the rate of decomposition will vary from place to place.
because they reflect the activity of fungi and termites. The team suggests that scientists need to embrace the variability found across data collected from many different sites instead of averaging it all together to create better models with more accurate predictions.
whether to the consumption of fungi growing on the wood or to termites consuming the wood.
#Flowers polarization patterns help bees find foodbees use their ability to'see'polarized light when foraging for food researchers based at the University of Bristol have discovered.
Polarization patterns occur on the petals of real flowers but are invisible to us and thus may be overlooked a hitherto component of floral signalling.
Around 53 per cent of flower species face downwards and thus their polarization patterns are presented in such a way as to be visually accessible to the region of the bee's eye
Light reflected from downward facing flowers also has the potential to contrast with skylight polarization patterns potentially helping the bee to detect
and identify such flowers. Professor Partridge said: Both pollinator and plant fitness is greatly dependent on the ability of pollinators to discriminate flowers accurately
and bees have been shown to be able to use a wide range of floral cues including colour shape texture certain chemical compounds
and temperature to improve the identification and recognition of flowers. Recent findings have added floral humidity and electric fields as additional methods with
which pollinators can discriminate flowers and it is advantageous for a plant to produce a number of different signals that a pollinator can utilise effectively.
While some specific carefully designed actions--such as planting flowers for pollinators restoring species-rich grassland
#What a 66-million-year old forest fire reveals about the last days of the dinosaursas far back as the time of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago forests recovered from fires in the same manner
During an expedition in southern Saskatchewan Canada the team discovered the first fossil-record evidence of forest fire ecology--the regrowth of plants after a fire--revealing a snapshot of the ecology on earth just before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.
The researchers'discovery revealed that at the forest fire site the plants are dominated by flora quite similar to the kind that begin forest recovery after a fire today.
We were looking at the direct result of a 66-million-year old forest fire preserved in stone says Emily Bamforth of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum and the study's first author.
Forest fires can affect both plant and animal biodiversity. The team's finding of ancient ecological recovery from a forest fire will help broaden scientists'understanding of biodiversity immediately before the mass extinction of dinosaurs.
We won't be able to fully understand the extinction dynamics until we understand what normal ecological processes were going on in the background. says Larsson.
The Parrot came with a protective polystyrene hull for use indoors and Bowman has demonstrated it during meetings with area farmers.
The drones also may be deployed in the battle against Palmer amaranth an invasive weed that is spreading across the Midwest
Palmer amaranth is becoming increasingly resistant to herbicides and spreads so prolifically that it could drastically reduce farmers'yield potential in affected fields.
Before the soybean rows close or if we get a different spectrum response from some of these weeds as they break through the canopy we may see some of those weeds show up in the imagery as well to identify where there are hot spots
and vines respond when the Amazonian rainforest is fragmented by cattle ranching. The fragmented forests they found change rapidly.
Lots of trees have died while vines which favor disturbed forests proliferate rapidly said Jose Luis Camargo of Brazil's National Institute for Amazonian Research.
and died faster and the vines also multiplied. These changes might be driven by increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere said Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University In virginia USA who initiated the long-term study.
#Human stem cells successfully transplanted, grown in pigsone of the biggest challenges for medical researchers studying the effectiveness of stem cell therapies is that transplants
or grafts of cells are rejected often by the hosts. This rejection can render experiments useless making research into potentially lifesaving treatments a long and difficult process.
By establishing that these pigs will support transplants without the fear of rejection we can move stem cell therapy research forward at a quicker pace.
Once the scientists implanted the cells the pigs did not reject the stem cells and the cells thrived.
Now that we know that human stem cells can thrive in these pigs a door has been opened for new and exciting research by scientists around the world Roberts said.
#Tree hugging helps koalas keep their coolaustralia's koalas cope with extreme heat by resting against cooler tree trunks new research has revealed.
Access to cool tree trunks would significantly reduce the amount of heat stress for koalas. Co-author Dr Michael Kearney said the findings were important as climate change is bringing about more extreme weather.
Cool tree trunks are likely to be an important microhabitat during hot weather for other tree dwelling species including primates leopards birds and invertebrates.
and the bacteria were not able to survive inside the phloem of the plant where osmotic pressure from sugar is said highâ Fernando Pagliai a co-author of the study
Phloem is the living tissue that carries organic nutrients to all parts of the plant.
which sucks on leaf sap and leaves behind bacteria. The bacteria then move through the tree via the phloem.
The disease starves the tree of nutrients damages its roots and the tree produces fruits that are green and misshapen unsuitable for sale as fresh fruit or for juice.
Most infected trees die within a few years. The disease has affected already millions of citrus trees in North america
UF/IFAS researchers have attempted everything from trying to eradicate the psyllid to breeding citrus rootstock that shows better greening resistance.
and snowdrop lectin. Feeding acute and chronic doses to honeybees--beyond the levels they would ever experience in the field--the team found it had only a very slight effect on the bees'survival and no measurable effect at all on their learning and memory.
During the study the bees were exposed to varying concentrations of the spider/snowdrop bio-pesticide over a period of seven days.
This is an oral pesticide so unlike some that get absorbed through the exoskeleton the spider/snowdrop recombinant protein has to be ingested by the insects.
#Palmer amaranth threatens Midwest farm economy, researchers reportan invasive weed that has put some southern cotton farmers out of business is now finding its way across the Midwest
--and many corn and soybean growers don't yet appreciate the threat University of Illinois researchers report.
Palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri) a flowering plant native to the Sonoran desert and southwest United states has a laundry list of traits that make it a fierce competitor on the farm said Aaron Hager a University of Illinois
Palmer amaranth germinates throughout much of the growing season starts earlier and grows faster than other weeds
and is seed a prolific producer Hager said. It can tolerate drought and heat extremes that would kill other plants.
As a seedling Palmer amaranth looks a lot like waterhemp another problematic weed that is difficult to control.
In other parts of the U s. this species has devastated cotton production and in many areas especially in Georgia it was not uncommon to see cotton fields literally mowed down to prevent this weed from producing seed Hager said.
Some growers who failed to recognize the threat lost their farms as a result he said.
Preventing a Palmer amaranth takeover also comes at a cost however. In 2010 for example Southeast Farm Press reported that the cost of weed control efforts on Georgia farms had risen from $25 per acre to $60 to $100 an acre in response to Palmer amaranth invasions.
The state spent at least $11 million in 2009 to manually remove Palmer amaranth from 1 million acres of cotton something not normally done the magazine reported.
Adam Davis a researcher with the U s. Department of agriculture Agricultural research service and a professor of crop sciences at the U. of I. reported at a recent agricultural conference that Palmer amaranth can reduce soybean yields by 78 percent
and corn yields by 91 percent. Illinois a state with a $9 billion agricultural commodities market and 80 percent of its land area devoted to farming (mostly corn
--or failing to properly fight--this weed Hager said. If you think about the value of agronomic row crops in this state that's why we're very very concerned about how devastating this could be to us he said.
So far researchers have confirmed the presence of Palmer amaranth in more than two dozen Illinois counties from the southern tip of the state to Will County about 50 miles south of downtown Chicago.
In about half of those counties the weed is already resistant to glyphosate the most commonly used herbicide on Midwest farms Hager said.
Some soybean fields in Kankakee County Illinois became so overgrown with Palmer amaranth that the soybeans were barely visible to the eye.
Many farmers think they can use the same techniques that tend to work against other common weeds--a onetime application of glyphosate herbicide for example--to control Palmer amaranth Hager said.
And if the weed gains a foothold in planted fields corn and soybean growers in Illinois should take a tip from Georgia cotton farmers
and do everything possible to remove the plants he said. Not a single plant should be tolerated.
It's hard to imagine another weed species that would be more injurious to crop production than
The structure has been created by academics from the University of Lincoln UK taking its inspiration from the University's Digital Capabilities garden which won Gold at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2013.
or human being says lead author Jianwu (Jim) Tang an assistant scientist in the MBL Ecosystem Center.
But Tang and colleagues found both energy production (photosynthesis) and energy consumption (respiration) decrease with age resulting in an overall decrease in growth rates.
Our finding also suggests the forest carbon sink may decrease in the U s. because of the slowdown in forest growth Tang says.
According to Bradford the use of mean responses can mask the local-scale information such as the abundance of soil fungi and animals
#Tracking potato famine pathogen to its home may aid $6 billion global fightthe cause of potato late blight
and five other institutions concludes that Phytophthora infestans originated in this valley and co-evolved with potatoes over hundreds
Potato late blight continues to be a major threat to global food security and at least $6 billion a year is spent to combat it mostly due to the cost of fungicides and substantial yield losses.
Finding ways to genetically resist the potato late blight scientists say could help reduce the use of fungicides
which produced tubers but were thought more often of as a weed than a vegetable crop.
But what the New world provided it also took away--in the form of a potato late blight attack that originated from Mexico caused multiple crop failures
Natural microbe inhibits rice blast fungusa fungus that kills an estimated 30 percent of the world's rice crop may finally have met its match thanks to a research discovery made by scientists at the University of Delaware
and soil sciences in UD's College of Agriculture and Natural resources has identified a naturally occurring microbe living right in the soil around rice plants--Pseudomonas chlororaphis EA105--that inhibits the devastating fungus known as rice blast.
What's more the beneficial soil microbe also induces a system-wide defense response in rice plants to battle the fungus.
In addition to rice a distinct population of the rice blast fungus also now threatens wheat production worldwide.
According to Bais the rice blast fungus (Magnaporthe oryzae) attacks rice plants through spores resembling pressure plugs that penetrate the plant tissue.
Once these spores infiltrate the cell wall the fungus eats the plant alive as Bais says.
In order to do its work the spore must produce a structure called the appressorium a filament that adheres to the plant surface like an anchor.
Without it the fungus can't invade the plant. In a research study published in the journal Planta this past October Bais
The next step in the research was to sample the rhizosphere the soil in the region around the roots of rice plants growing in the field to reveal the microbial community living there
Additionally increasing the algae blooms would likely wreak havoc by decreasing the oxygen available for other marine life.
and bole char and then ran statistical analyses that compared the relationship between severity measures
Plant-feeding insects are attracted often to odors that are released by damaged plant tissue because these plants are already under attack
New nasty weeds sometimes evolve directly from natural crosses between domesticated species and their wild relatives.
Surely these couldn't be fathers from outside of our wild radish populations--hundreds of meters away?
and seeds are mobile. However an important caveat that Ellstrand reports in his review is that the relative importance of gene flow can vary tremendously among species
The concept of ETI was developed to describe defense against pathogens that enter into plant cells (e g. wheat rusts
and mildews potato late blight pathogens) and fits their defense mechanisms well. The presence of the pathogen in the cell activates specific proteins that cause death of both the plant cell and the invading pathogen.
--i e. those foliar fungal pathogens that get into the leaf of the plant to exploit the space between its cells known as the apoplast to retrieve nutrients from the plant.
These include the damaging pathogens that cause septoria leaf blotch on wheat barley leaf blotch apple scab and light leaf spot on oilseed rape.
The ETI concept does not hold for defense against those pathogens that go into the leaf but not into the cells.
#Vines choke a forests ability to capture carbontropical forests are a sometimes-underappreciated asset in the battle against climate change.
New research by Smithsonian scientists shows increasingly abundant vines could hamper this potential and may even cause tropical forests to lose carbon.
In the first study to experimentally demonstrate that competition between plants can result in ecosystem-wide losses of forest carbon scientists working in Panama showed that lianas
or woody vines can reduce net forest biomass accumulation by nearly 20 percent Researchers called this estimate conservative in findings published this month in Ecology.
This paper represents the first experimental quantification of the effects of lianas on biomass said lead author Stefan Schnitzer a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
As lianas increase in tropical forests they will lower the capacity for tropical forests to accumulate carbon.
Previous research by Schnitzer and others demonstrated that lianas are increasing in tropical forests around the globe.
Decreased rainfall is one suspect but lianas which are generally more drought-tolerant than trees are increasing in abundance even in rainforests that have not experienced apparent changes in weather patterns.
Lianas climb trees to reach the forest canopy where their leaves blot out the sunlight required for tree growth.
They account for up to 25 percent of the woody plants in a typical tropical forest but only a few percent of its carbon.
Machetes in hand Schnitzer and colleagues chopped lianas out of forest plots for this study. After collecting eight years of data comparing liana-free plots with naturally liana-filled plots in the same forest they quantified the extent to which lianas limited tree growth hence carbon uptake.
In gaps created by fallen trees lianas were shown to reduce tree biomass accumulation by nearly 300 percent.
Findings by Schnitzer and colleagues also published this year in Ecology showed that liana distribution
and diversity are determined largely by forest gaps which is not the case for tropical trees.
The ability of lianas to rapidly invade open areas and young forests may dramatically reduce tropical tree regeneration
Lianas have been shown to consistently hinder the recruitment of small trees and limit the growth fecundity and survival of established trees.
because lianas prevent trees from accumulating vast amounts of carbon but lianas cannot compensate in terms of carbon accumulation said Schnitzer.
If lianas continue to increase in tropical forests they will reduce the capacity for tropical forests to uptake carbon
which will accelerate the rate of increase of atmospheric carbon worldwide. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
They then conducted field trials in a commercial cherry orchard in Southern Tasmania Australia from leaf fall in June until harvest the following February.
Each species flowers intensively for approximately one-two weeks and the total season is around two months.
Eventually water and nutrients no longer flow to the tips of the branches and the tree dies.
Ash trees (Fraxinus spp. line city streets and fill agricultural windbreaks throughout much of North america--38 million landscape trees in the 25 states surrounding Detroit according to US Forest Service estimate.
#Straw from oilseed as a new source of biofuelsthe bright yellow fields of oilseed rape are a familiar sight at this time of year but for scientists
Researchers at the Institute of Food Research are looking at how to turn straw from oilseed rape into biofuel.
Straw from crops such as wheat barley oats and oilseed rape is seen as a potential source of biomass for second generation biofuel production.
This is then fermented by yeast into ethanol. Using the facilities at the Biorefinery Centre on the Norwich Research Park Professor Keith Waldron
In the main oilseed rape has been bred to improve oilseed yield and disease resistance without paying much attention to the straw.
whether there are ways of breeding more biofuel-ready varieties of oilseed rape with the same yields of oilseed but with more amenable straw.
and let the wildflowers grow can be very beneficial to bees. In the past two decades the European union has spent â1 billion on agri-environment schemes which aim to improve the rural landscape health
According to Couvillon it may be that the regular mowing required initially to discourage certain plants from growing in those plots might leave few wildflowers for bees.
and cost to survey such an area on foot--to monitor nectar sources for quality and quantity of production to count the number of other flower-visiting insects to account for competition
A new view of forest fungithe so-called symbiotic relationship between trees and the fungus that grow on their roots may actually work more like a capitalist market relationship between buyers
that the fungi or mycorrhizae that grow on tree roots work with trees in a symbiotic relationship that is beneficial for both the fungi and the trees providing needed nutrients to both parties.
These fungi including many edible mushrooms are particularly common in boreal forests with scarce nutrients.
In the recent experiments researchers found that rather than alleviating nutrient limitations in soil the root fungi maintain that limitation by transferring less nitrogen to the trees
and Management researcher Oskar Franklin in collaboration with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences used a theoretical model to explain the new experimental findings by simulating the interaction between individual fungus and plant.
The competition among trees makes them export excessive amounts of carbon to the fungi which seize a lot of soil nutrients.
Having multiple symbiotic trading-partners generates competition among both the fungi and the plants where each individual trades carbon for nutrients or vice versa to maximize profits not unlike a capitalistic market economy says Franklin
. Although doing business with fungi is a good deal from each tree's own point of view it traps the whole forest in nutrient limitation he says.
and belowground carbon loss from selective logging and ground level forest fires in the tropics based on data from 70000 sampled trees and thousands of soil litter and dead wood samples from 225 sites
The combination of selective logging and wildfires damages turns primary forests into a thick scrub full of smaller trees and vines which stores 40%less carbon than undisturbed forests.
coffee grounds are a great compost for cultivating mushrooms particularly gourmet mushrooms such as oyster shiitake and reishi.
Several students involved with the student farm have been growing oyster mushrooms for sale in the past but this grant allows them to take mushroom cultivation to a whole new level
and a fungus that conversely blazed its way into contention by virtue of the bright orange color it displays
Kaweesak's Dragon tree: Mother of Dragons Dracaena kaweesakii Location: Thailand Sounding like something out of Game of Thrones and standing 12 meters (nearly 40 feet) tall it's hard to believe the dragon tree went unnoticed this long.
Beautiful soft sword-shaped leaves with white edges and cream-colored flowers with bright orange filaments are the hallmarks of this impressive plant.
The dragon tree is found in the limestone mountains of the Loei and Lop Buri Provinces in Thailand
and may also be found in nearby Burma. Valued as a horticultural plant its small number (perhaps 2500)
and the fact that it grows on limestone that is extracted for the manufacture of concrete has earned this species a preliminary conservation status of endangered.
ANDRILL Anemone: Discovery on Ice Edwardsiella andrillae Location: Antarctica A species of sea anemone living under a glacier on the Ross Ice shelf in Antarctica raises questions by its very existence.
Orange Penicillium: A New Fungus among Us Penicillium vanoranjei Location: Tunisia Distinguished by the bright orange color it displays
when produced in colonies this fungus was named as a tribute to the Dutch royal family specifically His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange.
It was reported in a journal published by the National Herbarium of The netherlands. The newcomer was isolated from soil in Tunisia.
Leaf-tailed Gecko: Look Hard to See This One Saltuarius eximius Location: Australia It's not easy to spot this gecko which has an extremely wide tail that is employed as part of its camouflage.
The new species was collected by sweeping vegetation in secondary growth forest at Laselva Biological Station in Costa rica.
At some point that space traveler would begin pining for the flowers and animals of home the smell of spring and the sound of running water.
hard-object feeders (e g. hard fruits seeds) mixed food feeders (e g. fruit) and leaf feeders.
and Turkey suggested that the great ape's diet evolved from hard-shelled fruits and seeds to leaves but these findings only contained samples from the early-Middle and Late Miocene while lack data from the epoch of highest diversity
and seeds at the beginning of the movement of great apes to Eurasia soft and mixed fruit-eating coexisted with hard-object feeding in the Late Miocene
or more times higher than those of European and Scandinavian countries that consume sunflower and olive oil Cook-Mills noted.
so that they can later develop buds flowers and fruit during the growing season said biometeorologist and study lead author Dennis Baldocchi
Baldocchi said that fruit developers are already trying to develop cultivars that can tolerate less winter chill.
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