Scirtothrips aurantii is a generalist horticultural pest in its native African range and recently established quite widely in Australia on the invasive succulent weed Bryophyllum delagoense. Paradoxically, this thrips is not polyphagous in its incursive range. The issue is principally one of quarantine. Will the thrips in Australia shift, perhaps adaptively, to citrus, and should the primary fo...

A new potyvirus, Zantedeschia mild mosaic virus (ZaMMV), was recently identified in calla lily ( Zantedeschia spp.) in Taiwan. The sequenced 3 ′ -terminal region indicated a unique amino acid sequence of ZaMMV, the N terminus of the capsid protein (CP), containing 39 glutamine residues before the DAG motif. In order to obtain antiserum for subsequent studies, a recombinant ZaMMV CP without poly...

Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) is a reliable and high-throughput technique for gene expression studies, but its accuracy depends on the expression stability of reference genes. To date, several reliable reference gene identifications have been reported in Lilium spp., but none has been obtained for lily tepals at different developmental stages. In this study, ten candidate reference genes...

Monocots are one of the most diverse, successful and economically important clades of angiosperms. We attempt to analyse the complete plastid genome sequences of two lilies and their lengths were 152,793bp in Lilium longiflorum (Liliaceae) and 155,510bp in Alstroemeria aurea (Alstroemeriaceae). Phylogenetic analyses were performed for 28 taxa including major lineages of monocots using the seque...

Lilies (Lilium sp.) are commercially important horticultural crops widely cultivated for their flowers and bulbs. Here, we conducted large-scale data mining of the lily transcriptome to develop transcription factor (TF)-associated microsatellite markers (TFSSRs). Among 216,768 unigenes extracted from our sequence data, 6966 unigenes harbored simple sequence repeats (SSRs). Seventy-one SSRs were...

The branching order of major angiosperm lineages is a challenging phylogenetic question that has received substantial attention in recent years. Two main competing hypotheses place the New Caledonian Amborella as either sister to all other extant angiosperms (Amborella-sister) or to the water lilies (AmborellaþNymphaeales). Here, we revisit this question by expanding a transcriptomic data set o...

Echinoderms (sea urchins, sea stars, brittle stars, sea lilies and sea cucumbers) are a group of diverse organisms, second in number within deuterostome species to only the chordates. Echinoderms serve as excellent model systems for developmental biology due to their diverse developmental mechanisms, tractable laboratory use, and close phylogenetic distance to chordates. In addition, echinoderm...

Alpinia genus are known generally as ginger-lilies for showy flowers in the ginger family, Zingiberaceae, and their floral morphology diverges from typical monocotyledon flowers. However, little is known about the functions of ginger MADS-box genes in floral identity. In this study, four AP1/AGL9 MADS-box genes were cloned from Alpinia hainanensis, and protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and ro...