T he term monoculture originates in the biological sciences, where it refers to a population entirely comprising instances of a single organism. Monocultures are rare in nature, and for good reason: they risk extinction from pathogens and have less chance of adapting to changing conditions. A pathogen could destroy some members of a diverse population but not all of them—diversity thus helps en...

Under consecutive monoculture, the biomass and quality of Pseudostellaria heterophylla declines significantly. In this study, a three-year field experiment was conducted to identify typical growth inhibition effects caused by extended monoculturing of P. heterophylla. Deep pyrosequencing was used to examine changes in the structure and composition of soil fungal community along a three-year gra...

BACKGROUND The consecutive monoculture for most of medicinal plants, such as Rehmannia glutinosa, results in a significant reduction in the yield and quality. There is an urgent need to study for the sustainable development of Chinese herbaceous medicine. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Comparative metaproteomics of rhizosphere soil was developed and used to analyze the underlying mechanism of...

BACKGROUND Leafcutter ants depend on the cultivation of symbiotic Attamyces fungi for food, which are thought to be grown by the ants in single-strain, clonal monoculture throughout the hundreds to thousands of gardens within a leafcutter nest. Monoculture eliminates cultivar-cultivar competition that would select for competitive fungal traits that are detrimental to the ants, whereas polycultu...

in order to evaluate the effects of yield and yield components and weed diversity and density in row intercropping for wheat and canola, a field experiment was conducted based on a complete randomized block design with three replications at the agricultural research station of ferdowsi university of mashhad, iran during two growing seasons of 2008-2009 and 2009-2010. treatments included four pa...

Given the growing challenges to food and eco-environmental security as well as sustainable development of animal husbandry in the farming and pastoral areas of northeast China, it is crucial to identify advantageous intercropping modes and some constraints limiting its popularization. In order to assess the performance of various intercropping modes of maize and alfalfa, a field experiment was ...

Radix pseudostellariae is a perennial tonic medicinal plant, with high medicinal value. However, consecutive monoculture of this plant in the same field results in serious decrease in both yield and quality. In this study, a 3-year field experiment was performed to identify the inhibitory effect of growth caused by prolonged monoculture of R. pseudostellariae. DGGE analysis was used to explore ...

A strict field experiment with crops sown in crop rotation and monoculture wascarried out in the years 1988-2012 at the Experimental Station Uhrusk belonging tothe University of Life Sciences in Lublin, south-eastern Poland. The study wasaimed at evaluating the structure of weed communities occurring in crop rotationand monoculture of cereals. The highest weed density m-2 was determined inthe s...

Nitrogen availability and tree species selection play important roles in reforestation. However, long-term field studies on the effects and mechanisms of tree species composition on N transformation are very limited. Eight years after tree seedlings were planted in a field experiment, we revisited the site and tested how tree species composition affects the dynamics of N mineralization and nitr...

Two studies from Jarosz et al. describe how [GAR(+)], a protein-based epigenetic determinant found mainly in wild yeast strains, can be activated by microbial cross-kingdom communication. With the aid of genetically and ecologically diverse bacteria, yeast can override an ancient regulatory mechanism of glucose repression, promoting both microbial diversity and lifespan extension.