Mycotoxin-producing Fusarium graminearum and related species cause Fusarium head blight on cultivated grasses, such as wheat and barley. However, these Fusarium species may have had a longer evolutionary history with North American grasses than with cultivated crops and may interact with the ancestral hosts in ways which are biochemically distinct. We assayed 25 species of asymptomatic native g...

Biostimulants are becoming more prevalent in the production of forage and turfgrasses. Many can be classified as natural biostimulants, including humic acids (HA), fulvic (FA), protein hydrolysates (PHs) seaweed extracts (SWE), addition to chitosan, silicon, inorganic compounds, beneficial fungi, bacteria synthetic biostimulants. The article reviews recent research on effects biostimulants cult...

The grasses, members of the family Gramineae or Poaceae, are represented by over 10,000 species (Kellogg and Birchler 1993). Three of the domesticated grasses, rice, wheat, and maize, account for about half of total world food production. Although the oldest known grass fossils have been found in paleocene-eocene deposits that are ∼50–60 million years old (Crepet and Feldman 1991), morphologica...

Some forage grasses such as Great Basin wild ryegrass and Nordan standard crested wheatgrass are economically important because of their adaptation to grazing and environmental stress. These tests show that these forage grasses are hosts of M. chitwoodi. As reported for other Meloidogyne species (7), infection by M. chitwoodi may increase host sensitivity to drought by obliterating, compressing...

forage species in mixtures are extensively grown worldwide nowadays, particularly as a step towards sustainable agriculture, however, information on this topic is scanty in our country. thus a 2-year (2001-2003) field experiment was conducted to determine the forage yield, botanical composition, as well as competition of some forage grasses and legumes as mono and dual cultures combinations at ...

The exploding availability of genome and EST-based sequences from grasses requires a technology that allows rapid functional analysis of the multitude of genes that these resources provide. There are several techniques available to determine a gene's function. For gene knockdown studies, silencing through RNAi is a powerful tool. Gene silencing can be accomplished through stable transformation ...

Starch is the most widespread and abundant storage carbohydrate in crops and its production is critical to both crop yield and quality. In regard to the starch content in the seeds of crop plants, there is a distinct difference between grasses (Poaceae) and dicots. However, few studies have described the evolutionary pattern of genes in the starch biosynthetic pathway in these two groups of pla...