BACKGROUND Abiotic stresses are serious threats to plant growth, productivity and result in crop loss worldwide, reducing average yields of most major crops. Although abiotic stresses might elicit different plant responses, most induce the accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in plant cells leads to oxidative damage. L-ascorbic acid (AsA, vitamin C) is known as an antioxidant and H2O2-...

We investigate two destabilization mechanisms for elastic polymer films and put them into a general framework: first, instabilities due to in-plane stress and, second, due to an externally applied electric field normal to the film's free surface. As shown recently, polymer films are often stressed due to out-of-equilibrium fabrication processes such as, e.g., spin coating. Via an Asaro-Tiller-G...

Time-dependent creep analysis is presented for the calculation of stresses and displacements of axisymmetric thick-walled cylindrical pressure vessels made of functionally graded material (FGM). For the purpose of time-dependent stress analysis in an FGM pressure vessel, material creep behavior and the solutions of the stresses at a time equal to zero (i.e. the initial stress state) are needed....

Cystatin is a class of proteins mainly involved in cysteine protease inhibition and plant growth and development, as well as tolerance under various abiotic stresses. In this study, we performed the first comprehensive analysis of the molecular characterization and expression profiling in response to various abiotic stresses of the cystatin gene family in Brachypodium distachyon, a novel model ...

In the framework of designing laboratory tests of relativistic gravity, we investigate the gravita-tional field produced by the magnetic field of a solenoid. Observing this field might provide a mean of testing whether stresses gravitate as predicted by Einstein's theory. A previous study of this problem by Braginsky, Caves and Thorne predicted that the contribution to the gravitational field r...

Plants are exposed to combinations of various biotic and abiotic stresses, but stress responses are usually investigated for single stresses only. Here, we investigated the genetic architecture underlying plant responses to 11 single stresses and several of their combinations by phenotyping 350 Arabidopsis thaliana accessions. A set of 214 000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) was screened...