Ever since the arrival of the tomato to Spain in the 16th century, great diversification of the crop has taken place, giving rise to a rich collection of varietal types. The ‘Comunidad Valenciana’, with its deep-rooted agricultural tradition, is one of the Spanish regions with the greatest diversity in traditional tomato varieties, characterised by their local adaptation and high fruit quality....

Salinity is a major abiotic-stress worldwide which decreases crop growth productivity. The objective of the present study was to investigate whether salt stress has adverse effects on growth, photosynthetic efficiency, biochemical properties and nutrient status of maize. An experiment was carried out with seeds of four varieties of maize which were allowed to germinate for one week. Afterwards,...

A Kuga fiber variety is a family of abelian varieties parametrized by a locally symmetric space and is constructed by using an equivariant holomorphic map of Hermitian symmetric domains. We construct a complex torus bundle T over a Kuga fiber variety Y parametrized by X and express its cohomology H∗(T ,C) in terms of the cohomology of Y as well as in terms of the cohomology of the locally symme...

As sessile organisms, plants are inevitably exposed to one or a combination of stress factors every now and then throughout their growth and development. Stress responses vary considerably even in the same plant species; stress-susceptible genotypes are at one extreme, and stress-tolerant ones are at the other. Elucidation of the stress responses of crop plants is of extreme relevance, consider...

Insect pests may have a severe impact on cotton production in Australia. Key pests are Helicoverpa spp which are well adapted to exploit cropping systems and often evolve resistance to pesticides. Until recently adoption of IPM has been restricted by a lack of nondisruptive tools. IPM must be founded on a thorough understanding of the ecology of pest and beneficial species, their interaction wi...

van der Voet et al. (2011) describe statistical methodology that the European Food Safety Authority expects an applicant to adopt when making a GM crop regulatory submission. Key to their proposed methodology is the inclusion of reference varieties in the experimental design to provide a measure of natural variation amongst commercially grown crops. While taking proper account of natural variat...

In crop variety registration, visual scores of a plant’s appearance are widely and routinely used to establish variety differences. This makes it an ideal candidate for automating through machine vision. This paper describes the outline of a planned system for searching for matches between images from new candidate varieties and those stored in a database of established varieties. Some of the i...

T he use of plants as crops to produce food, fiber, and other products has an amazing record of environmental safety. The greatest risk with any plant deliberately introduced into a new environment is its potential for inva-siveness beyond the planted area—to become a weed—but even here crop plants have an outstanding record of safety. Crop plants typically must be managed as " weedy " voluntee...