Pollen provides floral visitors with essential nutrients including proteins, lipids, vitamins and minerals. As an important nutrient resource for pollinators, including honeybees and bumblebees, pollen quality is of growing interest in assessing available nutrition to foraging bees. To date, quantifying the protein-bound amino acids in pollen has been difficult and methods rely on large amounts...

The intersubspecific hybrids of autotetraploid rice has many features that increase rice yield, but lower seed set is a major hindrance in its utilization. Pollen sterility is one of the most important factors which cause intersubspecific hybrid sterility. The hybrids with greater variation in seed set were used to study how the F(1) pollen sterile loci (S-a, S-b, and S-c) interact with each ot...

Tropical paleoecologists use a combination of mud-water interface and modern pollen rain samples (local samples of airborne pollen) to interpret compositional changes within fossil pollen records. Taxonomic similarities between the composition of modern assemblages and fossil samples are the basis of reconstructing paleoclimates and paleoenvironments. Surface sediment samples reflect a time-ave...

Double fertilization of flowering plants depends on the targeted transportation of sperm to the embryo sac by the pollen tube. Currently, little is known about the underlying molecular mechanisms that regulate pollen germination and pollen tube growth in maize (Zea mays). Here, a maize pollen-predominant gene Zm908, with several putative short open reading frames (sORFs), was isolated and chara...

To clarify the relationship between pollen density and gametophytic competition in Pyrus pyrifolia, gametophytic performance, gibberellin metabolism, fruit set, and fruit quality were investigated by modifying P. pyrifolia pollen grain number and density with Lycopodium spores. Higher levels of pollen density improved seed viability, fruit set, and fruit quality. Treatments with the highest pol...

Pollen forecasting is of increasing interest as a way to help the general public avoid contact with allergy-inducing pollen. It was recently reported that the dynamics underlying pollen concentration series is very similar to that of low-dimensional deterministic chaos, thus opening up new avenues of development in local pollen forecasting. Our analysis of hourly cedar pollen series for two sea...

BACKGROUND The route by which pollen enters dwellings has not been clarified. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the amount of pollen entering dwellings by ventilation and adhesion to textile products. METHODS The amount of pollen clinging to fabrics (clothes, laundry, and futon bedding) out of doors was measured by quantification of Japanese cedar pollen antigen Cry j 1. The effect of air ventilation o...

Bee-collected pollen (bee pollen) is reported as a health food with a vast range of nutritional and therapeutic effects. Biochemical and hematological parameters in blood of rainbow trout treated to various concentrations of pollen (0.5, 2.5, 5, 10, 20 and 30 ppm) for 96 h were determined. The levels of total protein, creatinine, chloride and sodium in fish which exposed to different concentrat...

The identification of environmental changes by human action in the past is crucial for recovery plans and preservation of natural areas. Changes of the landscape (by human action) and natural shifts of vegetation can be showed by pollen records analysis. In this sense, pollen description of modern plants is important for use as a database for the identification of pollen samples of past. The in...

It is still unclear whether allergen-specific immunotherapy (AIT) with birch pollen improves birch pollen-related food allergy. One reason for this may be the lack of standardized tests to assess clinical reactions to birch pollen-related foods, for example apple. We tested the applicability of recombinant (r) Mal d 1, the Bet v 1-homolog in apple, for oral challenge tests. Increasing concentra...