They are projected to see more severe dry seasons and reduced growth of plants and near Lake victoria floodings.
The pea aphid feeds on plant sap. Its diet is deficient in essential nutrients called amino acids.
Known as the Geospatial Agricultural Management and Crop Assessment Framework (GAMCAF) the tool brings together crop models that estimate plant growth
and understanding the genetic basis of past plant improvement should help future efforts he said.
and between genes and the environment they looked at genes controlling several crop plant traits.
We conclude that the slow adaptation of domesticated plants by humans was likely due to historical factors that limited technological progress said Lukens.
The direct link between richness of leaf-chewing insects and their feeding damage across host plants in two tropical forests validates the underlying assumptions of many paleobiological studies that rely on damage-type richness as a means to infer changes in relative
This is the first attempt to compare leaf-chewing damage inflicted by many kinds of living insects on many kinds of plants throughout a large forest area both to the culprit insects
and their feeding damage on leaves of identified plant hosts. The number of collected insect species correlated strongly with the number of damage types recorded in canopy leaves of 24 tree
When plants are placed closer together he says it's easier for bad conditions to affect more plants.
It had emerged from its larval form in the small pool of water caught in the cupped leaves of a bromeliad plant.
Although the nuclear genome is important to fully understand evolutionary relationships in plants nuclear data sets are very difficult to obtain for large numbers of individuals
which plants are able to better defend themselves against disease-causing pathogens. The work led by Dr Jurriaan Ton
which is boosting plant immunity. BABA has long been known for its protective effects against devastating plant diseases such as potato blight
We have found that the plant receptor binding BABA is an'aspartyl trna synthetase 'which we have called IBI1.
but had never been linked to immune responses in plants Dr Luna said. Binding of the chemical to this protein triggers a secondary function that'primes'the plant immune system against future attacks by pests and diseases.
Dr Ton added: Plant immunity that is controlled by a single resistance gene on which most conventional breeding programs are based is comparably easy to overcome by a pathogen.
Dr Oliver Berkowitz a Research Associate in the ARC Centre for Excellence in Plant Energy Biology and the School of Plant Biology at the University of Western australia was involved also in the research.
Furthermore immune priming boosts so-called'multi-genic'resistance in plants. Although their research has been performed in a weed called'Arabidopsis thaliana'the work horse of plant geneticists the team is confident that their discovery can be used for the protection of crops from their enemies.
Proof-of-concept experiments have shown already that BABA is detected in a similar manner by tomato plants.
The house flies collected from the wastewater treatment plants likewise carried the same bacteria found in the waste itself he said.
House flies collected several miles from the wastewater treatment plants in surrounding urban areas had a lower prevalence of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria than those examined from the facilities themselves
and resulting marketability of tomato juice growers have used traditionally techniques such as subjecting plants to salt and water stresses.
We investigated whether coiling wire around the lower part of the plant stems to reduce the capacity of xylem to transport water to the shoot would result in low shoot moisture conditions
Eleven days after treatment the stem diameters immediately above the wire coils were markedly greater in treated plants compared with the corresponding stem regions of control plants they said.
The stems of treated plants were elongated less and developed fewer nodes at 39 and 51 days after treatment than did the control plants.
Several months after the application of the treatment marketable fruit harvested from the first to third trusses of the treated plants had average weights that were 49%to 89%of the weights of fruit from control plants.
The juice of fruit from the first to third trusses in the treated plants had soluble solids concentrations of 116%to 120%sucrose concentrations of 263%to 483
%and fructose and glucose concentrations of 135%to 155%compared with juice from corresponding control fruit.
At 112 days after treatment the shoots and roots of treated plants had weights that were 58%and 32%of those of control plants respectively.
Furthermore impeding water transport through the xylem to the upper parts of the plant by this treatment should accelerate a reduction in the moisture content of the shoot.
and time for coiling plants with wire the optimum width of the wire coil optimal methods for nutrient
Charles Webber III Merritt Taylor and James Shrefler conducted a research study published in Horttechnology to determine the impact of pelargonic acid--a fatty acid that occurs naturally in plants
But the biggest problem for potato growers lies in sexual reproduction since this produces new races of the fungus that attack the plants in a more virulent way
Plant lesions become visible on day five following an attack by the fungus. The symptoms can be seen firstly on the lower leaves where a light-green
In contrast to the promotion of organic products the use of biocontainers (plant material-based biodegradable pots) as alternatives to conventional plastic containers has been shown to resonate with many consumers.
and focuses on the environmental impacts of container use during the plant production phase explained Andrew Koeser corresponding author of the study published in Hortscience (March 2014).
The team's cradle-to-gate study compared the secondary impacts that occur during the greenhouse production of plants grown in biocontainers.
The impacts were presented in terms of contribution to the carbon footprint or global warming potential (GWP) of a single finished plant in a 10-cm-diameter container.
Although biocontainers have been linked to reduced performance in plant growth filling speed shipping success and irrigation demand trials these differences do not have a dramatic effect on production sustainability from a global warming potential perspective said the authors.
#Whitefly confused by cacophony of smellsbombarding pests with smells from many different plants temporarily confuses them
Biologists at Newcastle University UK have been exploring the potential of harmless plant volatiles as an alternative to pesticides in greenhouses.
when they are bombarded with lots of distracting information--the team pumped a mixture of plant smells into a greenhouse growing tomato plants.
Like other insect pests whitefly feed by pushing their long mouthpiece--or stylets--into the leaf until it reaches the plant's main source of nutrients travelling through the phloem.
Weaving their way between the plant cells to reach the sap is technically challenging and the team found the whiteflies failed to feed
while they were being bombarded with the different plant chemicals. Publishing their findings this week in the academic journal Agronomy of Sustainable Development research leads Dr Colin Tosh
But this is an easy and safe way of buying the plants time until their own chemical defense mechanisms kick in.
'when a number of plant species are mixed together rather than being exposed to a single crop.
Measuring the time it took from the insect settling on a plant to accessing the plant sap the team showed that hardly any of the whiteflies exposed to a range of smells started feeding from the phloem within 15 hours from the time of exposure.
Plants talk to each other when they are under attack--producing chemicals which warn other plants close by of the threat.
At the same time they produce a chemical which is unpleasant to the predator. But this response doesn't happen immediately
so if we can confuse the insects long enough to give the plants time to defend themselves this may go someway to reducing crop losses.
The team have started now the next phase of the study to investigate ways of helping plants to talk to each other
Then under stress from reactive oxygen molecules or when you eat antioxidants from certain plants like broccoli sprouts it prevents Keap1 from eating up Nrf2 allowing it to accumulate in the cell explained Zhang who is also a member of the UA BIO5 Institute.
and dairy is considerably higher than that from plant-based products. If all people within the EU would halve their meat
The current scarcity of dwarf birch seems to be a combination of the effects of global warming deer grazing and burning plants and trees on moors.
#How a plant beckons bacteria that will do it harma common plant puts out a welcome mat to bacteria seeking to invade
and host that researchers can exploit to protect plants. The team showed that the humble
and oft-studied plant Arabidopsis puts out a molecular signal that invites an attack from a pathogen.
and employs its molecular machinery to pierce it injecting its contents into the plant's cells--a crucial step in infecting an organism.
or T3ss to infect plants. In tomatoes the infection leads to unsightly brown spots. Peck's team at the University of Missouri had discovered a mutant type of the plant known as Arabidopsis mkp1
which is resistant to infection by Pseudomonas syringae. The Missouri and PNNL groups compared levels of metabolites in Arabidopsis to those in the mutant mkp1 form of the plant.
Peck's group used those findings as a guide to find the compounds that had the biggest effect--a combination that invites infection.
They found that the mutant has a much lower level of these cellular products on the surface of the plant than found in normal plants.
Since the resistant plants don't have high levels of these acids it stops the bacteria from unfurling the syringe in the presence of the plant.
or molecules that the plant uses to recognize the bacteria as a strategy for evading detection said Peck associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Missouri
Our results now show that the plant can also disguise itself from pathogen recognition by removing the signals needed by the pathogen to become fully virulent.
The work opens the door to new ways to rendering harmful bacteria harmless by modifying plants
Rather than trying to kill the bacteria eliminating the recognition signals in the plant makes the bacteria fairly innocuous giving the natural immune system more time to defend itself.
The browning of the forest canopy is observed consistent with decreases in the amount of water available to plants
Decreased cloudiness allowed more solar radiation to reach the plants which typically promotes photosynthesis but in this case it likely posed an extra stress on the plants from the resulting depletion of soil moisture.
Forests of the Congo basin are known to be resilient to moderate climate change because they have been exposed to dry conditions in the past few hundred years Saatchi said.
How the changes affect individual plant species in the area remains to be seen. For example drier conditions may favor deciduous trees at the expense of evergreen trees.
The fruiting canes of thornless blackberries and raspberries were lost so we won't have fruit from those plants this year.
Transpiration is the process of water movement through a plant and its evaporation from leaves stems and flowers.
That research found an unexpected spike in carcinogenic disinfection by-products in late summer in water treatment plants.
Where were those water treatment plants located? In bark beetle-infested watersheds. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by National Science Foundation.
The study findings will be published online April 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as part of a series of research papers on plant and animal domestication.
Crop domestication the process of selectively breeding a wild plant or animal species is of increasing interest to scientists.
By tracing back the ancestry of any domesticated plant we can better understand the genetic evolution of that species
To determine crop origins scientists have studied traditionally the plants'genetic makeup in geographic areas where they have observed high diversity among the crop's wild ancestors.
More recently they have examined also archaeological remains of plants including pollen starch grains and even mineralized plant secretions.
They also developed a model for the distribution of related plant species to predict the areas most environmentally suitable for the chili pepper and its wild ancestors.
when people at several different spots around the globe brought plants under cultivation and domesticated animals for transport food or fiber.
And while we're at it why haven't more species of either plants or animals been domesticated in modern times?
because it brought together people working on plants and animals and archeologists and geneticists. I hadn't really thought much about animal domestication
because I work primarily with plants so it was exciting to see the same problem from a very different perspective.
or wind-pollinated plants or for that matter domesticated animals accidentally or deliberately bred with wild relatives? Recent evidence that cereal crops such as wheat or barley evolved domestication traits much more slowly than had been thought has led to renewed interest in the idea that selection during domestication may have been partly accidental.
The big focus right now is how much unintentional change people were causing environmentally that resulted in natural selection altering both plants
The comparable idea for plants said Olsen is the dump heap hypothesis originally proposed by Edgar Anderson a botany professor here at Washington University.
when people threw out the refuse of plant foods including seeds some grew and again set seed and in this way people inadvertently selected species they were eating that also did well in the disturbed and nutrient-rich environment of the dump heap.
It was a bet-hedging strategy he said that ensured some plants would survive and produce seed even in a bad season.
So it wasn't people selecting the crop plants directly so much as people changing the landscape in ways that altered the selection pressure on plants.
because plants and animals were domesticated before humans invented writing and so figuring out what happened has been a matter of making do limited with the evidence that has survived.
Olsen on the other hand seeks to identify genes in modern crop species that are associated with domestication traits in the plant such as an erect rather than a sprawling architecture.
because present-day plants are only a subset of the crop varieties that may have existed once. So both Marshall and Olsen are excited by recent successes in sequencing ancient DNA.
and the effects that had on plant communities. It is really clear Marshall said that we need all the different approaches that we can possibly get in order to triangulate back.
Current projections forecast that about half of Earth's plants and animals will go extinct over the next century because of human activities mostly due to our agricultural methods.
the process of transferring CO2 from the atmosphere into the soil of a land unit through unit plants plant residues and other organic solids
when where and how humans turned wild plants and animals into the crops pets and livestock we know today.
Generally any mutations that are widespread in domestic plants and animals but absent from their wild relatives are assumed to have played a key role in the process spreading as people
Just because a plant or animal trait is common today doesn't mean that it was bred into them from the beginning Larson said.
and plants per county due to nearly three centuries of active commerce diverse tree species that provide suitable habitats and the means for invasive species to spread.
but the insects are important for plants as well. Honeybees are pollinators of untold numbers of plants in every ecosystem on the African continent Patch said.
They pollinate many food crops as well as those important for economic development and their products like honey
because carbon dioxide is being taken up by the plant materials and stored in the soil. It turns out that (carbon sequestration) has multiple benefits.
#Genetic study tackles mystery of slow plant domesticationsthe Modern View of Domestication a special feature of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published April 29 raises a number of startling questions
and gathering fruits and tubers to cultivating livestock and plants. It seems so straightforward and yet the more scientists learn the more complex the story becomes.
Did domesticating a plant typically take a few hundred or many thousands of years? Genetic studies often indicate that domestication traits have a fairly simple genetic basis
which early farmers were able to shape plant characteristics thus reconciling the genetic and archeological findings.
Olsen associate professor in the Department of biology in Arts & Sciences together with colleagues from Oklahoma State university and the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada conclude that these interactions are not a key factor in domesticated plants The process of domestication
What we are learning suggests there's a whole lot of diversity out there in wild relatives of crop plants
or even in landraces varieties of plants and animals that are adapted highly to local conditions Olsen said that wasn't tapped during the domestication process.
These plant populations could provide the diversity for continued breeding that is going to be very important as the world faces climatic change he said.
This includes seeds that remain attached to the plant for harvesting (a trait called nonshattering) reduced branching and robust growth of the central stem and bigger fruits seeds or tubers.
For example the gene teosinte branched1 (tb1) converts highly branched teosinte plants into single stalks of corn.
We decided to look at genetic mechanisms for modifying plant phenotypes that hadn't been explored before in part
and the effects of the environment on the expression of genes--might have slowed the selection of plants with the desired traits.
But when the plant scientists looked at comparable genetic mechanisms in domesticated plants they found the reverse to be true.
Farmers seem to have selected for plant variants that were insensitive to epistatic and environmental interactions.
But when wild and domesticated plants are crossed these genetic background effects are not symmetric. Shattering in plants with a wild green-millet allele at the QTLI location depends on the allele at the QTL2 location.
In contrast shattering in plants with the foxtail-millet allele at QTL1 is unaffected by the allele at the QTL2 location.
In the limited number of examples at their disposal the scientists found it to be generally true that that domesticated alleles were less sensitive to genetic background than wild alleles.
When a teosinte plant with a wild tb1 gene is backcrossed repeatedly with maize it produces highly branched plants in uncrowded growing conditions
plants with the domesticated tb1 gene allele are unbranched whether or not they are crowded. Unlike companion-animal breeders early farmers seem to have selected domestication-gene alleles that are insensitive to genetic background and to the environment.
because the effects of gene variants on the plant weren't stable. But once sensitive alleles had been replaced with robust ones breeders would have been able to exert strong selection pressure on plant traits shaping them much more easily than before
and the pace of domestication would have picked up. No wonder the archeological record indicates there were false starts failed efforts and long delays.
Though some of the forest understory is cleared for farming a rich web of plant and animal life remains.
H7 interacts directly with plant cells allowing it to anchor to the surface of a plant where it can multiply.
H7 uses whip-link structures on its surface known as flagella--typically used for bacterial motility--to penetrate the plant cell walls.
The team showed that purified flagella were able to directly interact with lipid molecules found in the membranes of plant cells.
E coli bacteria lacking flagella were unable to bind to the plant cells. Once attached the E coli are able to grow on and colonise the surface of the plant.
At this point they can be removed by washing although the researchers showed that a small number of bacteria are able to invade inside the plant where they become protected from washing.
The group have shown that E coli O157: H7 is able to colonise the roots of both spinach and lettuce.
This work shows the fine detail of how the bacteria bind to plants. We think this mechanism is common to many food-borne bacteria
and shows that they can exploit common factors found in both plants and animals to help them grow.
H7 bacteria use the same method of colonising the surface of plants as they do when colonising the intestines of animals.
but are actively interacting with both plants and animals. While outbreaks of vegetable-associated E coli outbreaks are rare in the UK
As biologists and specifically as botanists what really struck us was the diversity of fresh plant crops mostly of subtropical/tropical origin that were available in ethnic markets in the northern U s. Like their ancestors who traveled from Europe Africa
and Asia with favorite plants in tow the Puerto ricans of Hartford have maintained cuisine as an important component of their identity.
Fresh starchy plants called viandas were the most essential food group for recreating a sense of home.
Their strong interest in plants and people is driving an impressive body of work. In addition to continuing their research in Hartford Taylor
Muriuki and co-authors set out to learn where medicinal plant traders in Kenya sourced their raw materials
because they perceived these plants would have higher potency than farm-grown material. Such perception is based on the expectation that wild plants will have grown to full maturity and in rich soils with less interference from human activities such as chemical application.
Those who preferred farm-sourced material said this was expected because of higher quality from good crop husbandry increasing scarcity in the wild and for some a deliberate choice to conserve wild resources.
and total cadmium levels were excellent predictors of how much cadmium is biologically available for plants.
Robinson's work also shows ways to keep the cadmium from being taken up by plants.
His research showed that more acidic soils increased the cadmium that is available to plants. So using lime to prevent soil acidification could help lock the cadmium in the soil.
Such drastic temperature increases will drive off plant and animal species and may even threaten some with extinction warn the researchers.
Veggie is a deployable plant growth unit capable of producing salad-type crops to provide the crew with appetizing nutritious and safe fresh food
and will provide a venue for future plant growth research. Based upon anecdotal evidence crews report that having plants around from previous space studies was very comforting
and helped them feel less out of touch with Earth said Gioia Massa a project scientist at NASA's Kennedy space center in Florida.
You could also think of plants as pets. The crew just likes to nurture them. The Veggie unit provides lighting
Veggie can support a variety of studies used to determine how plants sense and respond to gravity.
Astronauts will harvest the plants for further investigation. With continued plant growth studies aboard the space station using facilities like Veggie crews may one day consume produce during long-term missions in low-Earth orbit
or to an asteroid or Mars. The Veggie unit's growth volume will be the largest volume available to date for plant growth on the space station
which will enable larger produce than was previously available due to size restrictions. This improved understanding of plant growth and development in microgravity has important implications for improving plant growth and biomass production On earth.
Continuing the important space station mission of Earth observation the new High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) investigation places four commercially available high definition cameras on the exterior of the space station
For one thing plants in nutrient-poor soils devote more energy to locating nutrients. When plants are in nutrient poor conditions they send out more roots
and produce chemicals that can help dissolve nutrients from the soil. This takes energy though
and so the plants produce less biomass says Obersteiner. Furthermore the study showed that nutrient-rich ecosystems also generally have more stable ground organic material
As Jon Veramendi head of the plant Agrobiotechnology research group explained tobacco plants as a source of biomass for producing bioethanol could be an alternative to traditional tobacco growing
In the course of the research which has been echoed by the journal Molecular Breeding tobacco plants of the Virginia Gold
The plants were modified genetically to increase their production of starch and sugars which contributes to the increase in ethanol production.
Traditional tobacco growing allows the plant to develop and the leaves to grow and get bigger as the nicotine is synthesised
when the plant is more mature. However if the plants are used for producing biofuels the researchers go for a higher-density crop similar to that of forage crops:
the tobacco plants are sown very close to each other and various mowings are made throughout the cycle. When the plant has grown to a height of about 50 cm it is cut
and the output is taken to the biomass processing factory. That way it is possible to obtain up to 160 tonnes of matter per hectare over the whole cycle.
What is more when the tobacco is integrated into a biorefinery it is possible to extract interesting by-products like proteins (they constitute up to 30%of the dry weight of the plant
and are nutritionally more complete and have a greater protein efficiency rate than those from cow's milk
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