Plant resistance to herbivores involves physical and chemical plant traits that prevent or diminish damage by herbivores, and hence may promote coevolutionary arm-races between interacting species. Although Datura stramonium's concentration of tropane alkaloids is under selection by leaf beetles, it is not known whether chemical defense reduces seed predation by the specialist weevil, Trichobar...

Polyamideimide coatings on magnet wire offer the best performance in chemical resistance and toughness. The thermal properties of polyamideimide coatings are also outstanding when compared to the cost of polyimide resins. Recent developments in polyamideimide resins are discussed and future trends-product offerings are also reviewed. Developments include corona resistance enamels, self-lubricat...

Synthetic biology offers a new path for the exploitation and improvement of natural products to address the growing crisis in antibiotic resistance. All antibiotics in clinical use are facing eventual obsolesce as a result of the evolution and dissemination of resistance mechanisms, yet there are few new drug leads forthcoming from the pharmaceutical sector. Natural products of microbial origin...

The increased urbanization of a growing global population makes imperative the development of sustainable integrated pest management (IPM) strategies for urban pest control. This emphasizes pests that are closely associated with the health and wellbeing of humans and domesticated animals. Concurrently there are regulatory requirements enforced to minimize inadvertent exposures to insecticides i...

Tamoxifen is the most commonly used drug to treat breast cancer and acts by blocking ERalpha (oestrogen receptor alpha) signalling. Although highly effective, its usefulness is limited by the development of resistance. Given this, strategies that limit resistance by sensitizing cells to tamoxifen may be of use in the clinic. To gain insight into how this might be achieved, we used chemical and ...

The isolation from bud scales and partial characterisation of highly active, low molecular weight, germination inhibitors, in concentrations correlated quantitively with resistance of N52/219, N11, NCo376, and NCo293, holds promise for the development of a rapid, quantitative, chemical assay for evaluating sugarcane for pre-infectional resistance to smut. Histopathological studies on stalk and ...

Antibiotics are often unstable and can decay into various compounds with potential biological activities. We found that as tetracycline degrades, the competitive advantage conferred to bacteria by resistance not only diminishes but actually reverses to become a prolonged disadvantage due to the activities of more stable degradation products. Tetracycline decay can lead to net selection against ...

Propolis is known as honeybee chemical defence against infections and parasites. Its chemical composition is variable and depends on the specificity of the local flora. However, there are no data concerning the relationship between propolis chemical composition and honeybee colony health. We tried to answer this question, studying the chemical composition of propolis of bee colonies from an api...

The objective of this paper was to examine the effect that chemical modification of raw material had on fire resistance of two panel products, namely Oriented Strand Board (OSB) and particleboard and to investigate the influence of the anhydride type. The results have shown that chemical modification affected the ignition and glowing time of two wood panel products.