Gongronema latifolium is a plant that has a wide range of nutritional and ethnomedical uses in different tropical African communities. Scientific reports on the chemical composition and bioactivity (anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, antidiabetic, antioxidant, anticancer and allelopathic properties) of the plant material by different authors are discussed in this review. Future prospects of the ...

At the time of the Spanish conquest, the Incas cultivated almost as many species of plants as the farmers of all Asia or Europe. On mountainsides up to four kilometers high along the spine of a whole continent and in climates varying from tropical to polar, they grew a wealth of roots, grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Without iron, wheels, or work animals for plowing, the Indians ...

Ecological complexity has been proposed to play a crucial role in primate brain-size evolution. However, detailed quantification of ecological complexity is still limited. Here we assess the spatio-temporal distribution of tropical fruits and young leaves, two primary chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) foods, focusing on the predictability of their availability in individual trees. Using up to 20 yea...

The New World Anoplotermes group is a common and diverse clade of soil-dwelling soldierless termites that is undergoing needed taxonomic reclassification. Based on robust worker gut morphology centered near the enteric valve, a new genus and its singular species, Compositermes vindai, are described from collections encompassing a massive expanse of tropical America. The enteric valve armature i...

From the ‡Center of Experimental Medicine, Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology I, University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, c/o Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY), and the §European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Outstation Hamburg at DESY, 22603 Hamburg, Germany, the ¶Bernhard-Nocht-Institute for Tropical Medicine, 20359 Hamburg, Germany, the Institute of Organic Chemistry, Bulgar...

Cochineal is the name of both crimson or carmine dye and the cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus), a scale insect from which the dye is derived. There are other species in the genus Dactylopius which can be used to produce cochineal extract, but they are extremely difficult to distinguish from D. coccus, even for expert taxonomists, and the latter scientific name (and the use of the term "coch...

in the present study, randomly amplified polymorphic dna (rapd) markers were used to analyze the genetic diversity in 20 varieties of philodendron. the polymerase chain reaction was performed with 60 rapd primers, out of which 21 primers showed clear amplification as well as more polymorphism. in total, 354 scorable rapd loci with 348 polymorphic bands (98%) were observed. percentages of polymo...

human t-cell lymphotropic virus (htlv) types 1 and 2 belong to the oncorna group of retroviridae, a large family of viruses, grouped initially by pathogenic features, but later revised on the basis of genome structure and nucleotide sequence. htlv-i was the first discovered human retrovirus to be associated with a malignancy in 1980. the malignancy, first described by uchiyama and co-workers in...

Cochineal is the name of both crimson or carmine dye and the cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus), a scale insect from which the dye is derived. There are other species in the genus Dactylopius which can be used to produce cochineal extract, but they are extremely difficult to distinguish from D. coccus, even for expert taxonomists, and the latter scientific name (and the use of the term "coch...

iron oxide minerals in soils provide valuable insights into pedogenic processes. a wealth of such information has been obtained by rock magnetic investigations on temperate soils but similar studies on tropical soils are rare. here, we report rock magnetic data on pristine soil profiles and surficial soils from five catchments in the tropical southern india and throw light on the pedogenic pro...