Here, we show a unique crop response to intraspecific interference, whereby neighboring sunflower plants in a row avoid each other by growing toward a more favorable light environment and collectively increase production per unit land area. In high-density stands, a given plant inclined toward one side of the interrow space, and the immediate neighbors inclined in the opposite direction. This p...

Cotton is one of the most important cash crops in the world and a few specific models have been built to simulate and predict cotton plants growth and development, such as L-OZCOT (Hanan and Hearn, 2003). The functional-structural GREENLAB model aims at simulating topological and morphological growth processes at organ scale for general plants (Yan et al., 2004). It has been used to investigate...

Plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) are naturally occurring soil bacteria that aggressively colonize plant roots and benefit plants by providing growth promotion. Inoculation of crop plants with certain strains of PGPR at an early stage of development improves biomass production through direct effects on root and shoots growth. Inoculation of ornamentals, forest trees, vegetables, and a...

Gramine and related alkaloids isolated from fodder plants in the Gramineae, Leguminoseae and other plant families [1] are responsible for the toxicity observed in ruminants grazing on these plants [2, 3]. Recently, these alkaloids were reported as toxic to aphids feeding on graminaceous crops [4]. Toxicity of gramine has been related to the known physiological effects of tryptamine related comp...

Recent advances in genome engineering (GE) has made it possible to precisely alter DNA sequences in plant cells, providing specifically engineered plants with traits of interest. Gene targeting efficiency depends on the delivery-method of both sequence-specific nucleases and repair templates, to plant cells. Typically, this is achieved using Agrobacterium mediated transformation or particle bom...

Whitefly (Bemisia tabaci) populations collected from five crop plants, viz brinjal, cotton, potato, tomato, soybean and a weed, Sida sp., and maintained on respective host plants were studied for virus acquisition from diseased cotton plant and its subsequent transmission to healthy cotton plants. The presence of virus in whitefly and diseased plants was established by PCR amplification of CLCu...

The objective of the study was to assess the growth contributing characters of biofield treated bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) and okra (Abelmoschus esculentus) seeds. The seeds of both crops were divided into two groups, one was kept aside and denoted as untreated, while the other group was subjected biofield energy treatment. The variabilities in growth contributing parameters were studie...

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is an important food legume crop, particularly for the arid regions including Indian subcontinent. Considering the detrimental effect of drought, temperature and salt stress on crop yield, efforts have been initiated in the direction of developing improved varieties and designing alternate strategies to sustain chickpea production in adverse environmental condition...