Cucumber, a very important vegetable crop worldwide, is easily damaged by pests. Aphids (Aphis gossypii Glover) are among the most serious pests in cucumber production and often cause severe loss of yield and make fruit quality get worse. Identifying genes that render cucumbers resistant to aphid-induced damage and breeding aphid-resistant cucumber varieties have become the most promising contr...

In unisexual flowers, sex is determined by the selective repression of growth or the abortion of either male or female reproductive organs. The mechanism by which this process is controlled in plants is still poorly understood. Because it is known that the identity of reproductive organs in plants is controlled by homeotic genes belonging to the MADS box gene family, we analyzed floral homeotic...

Root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne spp) are destructive agricultural pests that reduce the productivity of cultivated vegetables worldwide, especially when vegetables are cropped continuously in greenhouses. Cucumbers (Cucumis sativus L.), in particular, suffer extensive damage due to root-knot nematodes, and only a few wild species are known to be resistant. Grafting of cultivated plants to root...

Since the release of the cucumber draft genomes, significant progress has been made in molecular mapping or cloning of economically important genes and quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in cucumber, which provides the foundation for marker-assisted selection in cucumber breeding. In this paper, I summarized molecularly tagged genes and QTLs for simply inherited traits (total 21), host resistances ...

Meloidogyne incognita and Meloidogyne arenaria are important parasitic nematodes of vegetable and ornamental crops. Microplot and greenhouse experiments were conducted to test commercial formulations of the biocontrol agent Pasteuria penetrans for control of M. incognita on tomato and cucumber and M. arenaria on snapdragon. Three methods of application for P. penetrans were assessed including s...

BACKGROUND The genus Cucumis contains two species of important vegetable crops, C. sativus, cucumber, and C. melo, melon. Melon has iconographical and textual records from lands of the Mediterranean Basin dating back to antiquity, but cucumber does not. The goal of this study was to obtain an improved understanding of the history of these crops in the Occident. Medieval images purportedly of Cu...

E-2-hexenal is a volatile compound that is commonly emitted by wounded or stressed plants. It belongs to the group of so-called green leaf volatiles (GLVs), which play an important role in transferring information to plants and insects. While most biosynthetic enzymes upstream of E-2-hexenal have been studied extensively, much less is known about the enzyme responsible for the conversion from Z...

some crops have been observed to posses effects of allelopathic type. it would be interesting and useful as well to study these plants' allelopathic effects on other crop plants, particularly in rotation and intercropping. so, in this study, the allelopathic potential of cucumber organs' extract on seedling growth of cucumber, eggplant, pepper, and tomato was evaluated using a randomi...

Ferrochelatase catalyzes the insertion of Fe2+ into protoporphyrin IX to generate protoheme. A putative mature region of a cucumber ferrochelatase cDNA (hemH) was overexpressed in Escherichia coli and purified to homogeneity (40 kDa). The optimum pH was 7.7, and the apparent K(m) values for deuteroporphyrin IX and Fe2+ were 14.4 microM and 4.7 microM, respectively. The activity of the ferrochel...

Mycorrhiza application in horticultural production in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Turkey has been studied under field conditions for several years. The effects of different arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) have been evaluated under field conditions for cucumber production. The parameters measured were seedling survival, plant growth and yield, and root colonization. In 1998 and 1999, ...