Plant diseases cause dramatic yield losses worldwide. Current disease control practices can be deleterious for the environment and human health, calling for alternative and sustainable management regimes. Soils harbour microorganisms that can efficiently suppress pathogens. Uncovering mediators driving their functioning in the field still remains challenging, but represents an essential step in...

Understanding if the members of an ecological community have co-diversified is a central concern of evolutionary biology, as co-diversification suggests prolonged association and possible coevolution. By sampling associated species from an ecosystem, researchers can better understand how abiotic and biotic factors influence diversification in a region. In particular, studies of co-distributed s...

An important objective in weed management is the discrimination between grasses (monocots) and broad-leaved weeds (dicots), because these two weed groups can be appropriately controlled by specific herbicides. In fact, efficiency is higher if selective treatment is performed for each type of infestation instead of using a broadcast herbicide on the whole surface. This work proposes a strategy w...

AUTOMATED precision weed spot spraying in the sugarcane industry has potential to increase production while reducing herbicide usage. However, commercially-available technologies based on sensing of weed optical properties are typically restricted to detecting weeds on a soil background (i.e. detection of green on brown) and are not suited to detecting weeds among a growing crop. Machine vision...

nanomaterials (nms) are widely used in health and biomedical applications, however, only a few studies investigate their toxic effects.  the present report signifies a contribution to the study of the toxic effects of silver nanoparticles (ag nps)  on   e. coli cells, which is a model organism of anthropogenic pollution. the toxicity of nanoparticles depends on their  chemical and surface prope...

Plant shutdowns shape industry productivity, the dynamics of employment, and industrial restructuring. Plant closures account for more than half of gross job destruction in U.S. manufacturing. This paper examines the effects of firm structure on U.S. manufacturing plant closures. Plants belonging to multiplant firms and those owned by U.S. multinationals are less likely to exit. However, the su...

strawberry is a valuable, nutritious, and economically important fruit all over the world including bangladesh. therefore, there is a demand to develop a suitable variety of strawberry. for this purpose, leaf explants from in vitro grown strawberry plantlets were cultured onto ms medium supplemented with different concentrations and combinations of 2,4-d, naa and ba for callus induction. the mo...

In this study, for the purpose of determining physical and aerodynamic properties, some varieties of wheat, barley, chickpea and lentil were used. The length, width, thickness, geometric mean diameter, equivalent sphere diameter, sphericity, seed mass, bulk density, true density, projected area, terminal velocity, drag coefficient of each grain variety were determined. The theoretical terminal ...

Biological invasions are recognised to be a problem of growing severity. Human pathogens, weeds or pests in terrestrial systems and dominant alien species in freshwater or marine aquatic systems all impose significant costs in terms of forgone output or costs of control in every major system. Like many of the other environmental consequences of globalisation, biological invasions require that d...

apTreeshape is a R package dedicated to simulation and analysis of phylogenetic tree topologies using statistical imbalance measures. It is a companion library of the R package 'ape', which provides additional functions for reading, plotting, manipulating phylogenetic trees and for connecting to public phylogenetic tree databases. One strength of the package is to include appropriate correction...