Over three consecutive years in central Mississippi, sweetgum (Liquidambar styraci/lua L.) and sycamore (Platanus occidentalis L.) fruits had nearly reached fullsize by late June. Sweetgum seeds were physiologically mature by mid-August, but dry weight increased until late September. As sweetgum seeds matured, the crude fat level rose to 27 percent of seed dry weight. During maturation, concent...

In this chapter we describe an Agrobacterium tumefaciens transformation method of soybean that utilizes mature half seeds and regeneration from the cotyledonary node region. This method results in fertile transformed soybean plants and transgenic seed in approximately 9 months. Using mature half seeds as starting material has proven to be a reliable method that does not require additional wound...

Assessment of dormancy inception, maintenance and release was studied for artificially dried immature seeds harvested throughout seed development in the barley cv. Triumph and its mutant line TL43. Each was grown in Spain and Scotland under low and high dormancy inducing conditions, respectively. Both TL43 and Triumph followed a similar pattern of release from dormancy across the seasons, altho...

Immature, mature and endosperm-supported mature embryos of six triticale cultivars (BDMT-98-8S, Melez-2001, Mikham-2002, Presto, Tacettin Bey and Tatlicak-97) were cultured in vitro to compare the levels of callus induction and plant regeneration. Immature embryos, 15-18 days after anthesis, were aseptically excised and placed with the scutellum upwards on a callus culture medium consisting of ...

Seed-type vacuolar processing enzyme (VPE) activity is predicted to be essential for post-translational proteolysis of seed storage proteins in the protein storage vacuole of developing seeds. To test this hypothesis, we examined the protein profiles of developing and germinating seeds from Arabidopsis plants containing transposon-insertional knockout mutations in the genes that encode the two ...