the term “serological epidemiology” is based to describe a method which has unique applications in comparing the immunologic status and health experiences of various populations, especially among populations for which morbidity data and vital statistics are scanty or completely lacking, or for inaccessible areas where the collection of serum is made with difficulty. serologic and hematological ...

Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.) is a winter annual weed that presents a serious obstacle to rangeland restoration in the Intermountain West. The objective of this study was to evaluate factors regulating the size and persistence of cheatgrass carryover seed banks on semiarid sites in western Utah. We prevented current-year seed production in each of four habitats, then tallied emerging seedling...

Gene flow of transgenes into non-target populations is an important biosafety concern. The case of genetically modified (GM) maize in Mexico has been of particular interest because of the country's status as center of origin and landrace diversity. In contrast to maize in the U.S. and Europe, Mexican landraces form part of an evolving metapopulation in which new genes are subject to evolutionar...

Reduced seed longevity or storability is a major problem in seed storage and contributes to increased costs in crop production. Here we investigated whether seed galactinol contents could be predictive for seed storability behavior in Arabidopsis, cabbage and tomato. The analyses revealed a positive correlation between galactinol content and seed longevity in the three species tested, which ind...

Seed size is closely related to fitness of wild plants, and its modification has been a key recurring element in domestication of seed/grain crops. In sorghum, a genomic and morphological model for panicoid cereals, a rich history of research into the genetics of seed size is reflected by a total of 13 likelihood intervals determined by conventional QTL (linkage) mapping in 11 nonoverlapping re...

The role of cereal germplasm banks is to collect, maintain, preserve, and distribute seeds representing the genetic diversity of crop species. While germplasm resources have traditionally been used in breeding efforts to improve a crop plant, they have also proved useful in both applied and basic research efforts to give insight into the biology of a crop plant (Harlan, 1975; Hyland, 1977; Spra...

Antagonistic interactions, such as diseases, play an important role in natural populations. Understanding the mechanisms that promote long-term polymorphism at loci that are involved in host-parasite recognition is a fundamental problem in evolutionary ecology. Coevolution implies the existence of indirect frequency-dependent selection because the fitnesses of parasite genotypes depend on the f...

Thousands of landraces are stored in seed banks as "gold reserves" for future use in plant breeding. In many crops, their utilization is hampered because they represent heterogeneous populations of heterozygous genotypes, which harbor a high genetic load. We show, with high-density genotyping in five landraces of maize, that libraries of doubled-haploid (DH) lines capture the allelic diversity ...