INTRODUCTION Plants are the foundation for a significant part of human medicine and for many of the most widely used drugs designed to prevent, treat, and cure disease. A number of our cultivated crop plants, including many vegetable crops, were domesticated for medicinal purposes prior to their current use as food. Folkloric transmission of plant-based cures represents a fundamental and formid...

Nitrogen is fundamental to all life forms and is also one of the most limiting of nutrients for plant growth. Several clades of angiosperms have developed symbiotic relationships with actinorhizal bacteria that fix atmospheric nitrogen and increase access to this nutrient. However, the evolutionary patterns of actinorhizal nitrogen-fixing symbioses remain unclear to date. Furthermore the underl...

Hsu, C. L., Hoepting, C. A., Fuchs, M., Smith, E. A., and Nault, B. A. 2011. Sources of Iris yellow spot virus in New York. Plant Dis. 95:735-743. Iris yellow spot virus (IYSV) has been found consistently in commercial dry bulb onion fields throughout New York State since 2006. Yearly recurrence of IYSV may result from annual reintroductions of the virus or persistence of the virus in overwinte...

Small RNAs regulate a large set of gene expression in all plants and constitute a natural immunity against viruses. Small RNA based genetic engineering (SRGE) technology had been explored for crop protection against viruses for nearly 30 years. Viral resistance has been developed in diverse crops with SRGE technology and a few viral resistant crops have been approved for commercial release. In ...

Symbiotic association of legumes with rhizobia frequently results in higher photosynthesis and soluble carbohydrates in comparison with nitrate-fed plants, which might improve its potential for biomass conversion into bioethanol. A greenhouse experiment was conducted to examine the effects of nitrogen source and water availability on stem characteristics and on relationships between carbohydrat...

The complex symbiotic relationship between corals and their dinoflagellate partner Symbiodinium is believed to be sustained through close associations with mutualistic bacterial communities, though little is known about coral associations with bacterial groups able to fix nitrogen (diazotrophs). In this study, we investigated the diversity of diazotrophic bacterial communities associated with t...

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...

abstract in order to study the sensitivity of seven crops to total herbicide soil residue, an experiment was carried out under controlled conditions in 2009 at the college of agriculture, ferdowsi university of mashhad-iran. in this study 7 crops (pea, bean, lentil, corn, rape, beet and tomato), across 7 simulated soil residual concentration of total herbicide (0, 0.0002, 0.0005, 0.001, 0.002, ...

AFTER centuries of improving crop plants by breeding for desirable traits, agricultural scientists are now using the tools of molecular biology and genetic engineering to develop transgenic plants with the desired genes. Enormous progress has been made over the past decade in our understanding of the highly complex molecular events that occur in plant–pathogen interactions. This knowledge in tu...

Gene flow exposed by genetically engineered crops Gene flow is the transfer of genes between populations of the same or related species. The exchange between crop cultivars of genes selected by traditional breeding that confer characteristics such as shorter stems, higher yield, or increased seed quality will attract little attention. In the same way, crop-weed hybrids having acquired traits su...