Growth of herbaceous plants responds sensitively and rapidly to climate variability. Yet, little is known regarding how climate warming influences the growth of herbaceous plants, particularly in semi-arid sites. This contrasts with widely reported tree growth decline and even mortality in response to severe water deficits due to climate warming around the world. Here, we use the relatively nov...

BACKGROUND The responses of plant seeds and seedlings to changing atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition and precipitation regimes determine plant population dynamics and community composition under global change. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS In a temperate steppe in northern China, seeds of P. tanacetifolia were collected from a field-based experiment with N addition and increased precipitati...

Potentilla fulgens L., a locally used medicinal plant with reported hypoglycemic, antihyperglycemic, and anti-tumor properties was studied. The polar extracts of P. fulgens L. were assessed and found to induce cytotoxic response at different concentrations against a panel of human carcinoma cells such as THP-1 leukemia, HEP-2 liver, OVCAR-5 ovary, A-549 lung, PC-3 prostrate, and SF-295 neurobla...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS While within-species competition for light is generally found to be asymmetric - larger plants absorbing more than proportional amounts of light - between-species competition tends to be more symmetric. Here, the light capture was analysed in a 5-year-old competition experiment that started with ten genotypes of the clonal plant Potentilla reptans. The following hypotheses w...

In high altitude plants, flowering quickly ensures reproductive success within a short snow-free period, but limits maturation time and fecundity. Natural selection on prefloration intervals may therefore vary in contrasting snowmelt environments and could influence the outcome of phenological responses to climatic change. This study investigated adaptive differentiation and plasticity of prefl...

We have analyzed the flowering behavior of two Arabidopsis ecotypes: the laboratory strain Landsberg erecta (Ler) and an ecotype from the tropical Cape Verde Islands (Cvi). They differ little in their flowering phenotypes and in their responses to photoperiod length changes and to vernalization treatment. However, segregating populations derived from crosses between them showed a much larger va...

The SNPWave marker system, based on SNPs between the reference accessions Colombia-0 and Landsberg erecta (Ler), was used to distinguish a set of 92 Arabidopsis accessions from various parts of the world. In addition, we used these markers to genotype three new recombinant inbred line populations for Arabidopsis, having Ler as a common parent that was crossed with the accessions Antwerp-1, Kash...