Cereal domestication during the transition to agriculture resulted in widespread food production, but why only certain species were domesticated remains unknown. We tested whether seedlings of crop progenitors share functional traits that could give them a competitive advantage within anthropogenic environments, including higher germination, greater seedling survival, faster growth rates, and a...

Whilst it is agreed that climate change will impact on the long-term interactions between crops and weeds, the results of this impact are far from clear. We suggest that a thorough understanding of weed dominance and weed interactions, depending on crop and weed ecosystems and crop sequences in the ecosystem, will be the key determining factor for successful weed management. Indeed, we claim th...

Aflatoxins are highly toxic cancer causing fungal metabolites known to cause immune-system suppression, growth retardation, liver disease, and death in both humans and domestic animals. Human exposure to aflatoxins is limited by regulations that prohibit the use of crops containing excess quantities of aflatoxins for foods and feeds. Aflatoxins are regulated in part per billion (ppb) ranges wit...

in order to evaluate the effects of xanthium strumarium or amaranthus retroflexus competition under unsprayed and sprayed (half the recommended rate of imazethapyr) on canopy architecture of weed and soybean, field experiment was conducted at the research farm of university of tehran, during the growing season of 2007 and 2008. the experimental design was factorial based on randomized complete ...

Cardinal scores of individual competitive ability allow us to quantify the magnitude of the difference between the competitive ability of any two individuals. However, they have rarely been used in animal behaviour because most researchers were mainly interested in ordinal ranking. In this paper, we validated the normalized David's score (David H. A., Biometrika 74, 1987, 432; de Vries H., Stev...

In markets where buyers and suppliers negotiate prices, supplier costs, buyer willingnessto-pay, and competition (forces strategists often refer to as sources of bargaining power) determine only a range of potential prices, leaving the final price dependent on other factors (e.g. negotiating skill), which I call bargaining ability. I use a model of buyer demand and buyer-supplier bargaining, co...

Meiotic drive results when sperm carrying a driving chromosome preferentially survive development. Meiotic drive should therefore influence sperm competition because drive males produce fewer sperm than non-drive males. Whether meiotic drive also influences the competitive ability of sperm after ejaculation is unknown. Here we report the results from reciprocal crosses that are designed for est...