Host plant choice is of vital importance for egg laying herbivorous insects that do not exhibit brood care. Several aspects, including palatability, nutritional quality and predation risk, have been found to modulate host preference. Olfactory cues are thought to enable host location. However, experimental data on odor features that allow choosing among alternative hosts while still in flight a...

Background. To cope with their natural enemies, plants rely on resistance and tolerance as defensive strategies. Evolution of these strategies among natural population can be constrained by the absence of genetic variation or because of the antagonistic genetic correlation (trade-off) between them. Also, since plant defenses are integrated by several traits, it has been suggested that trade-off...

The presence of different glutamine synthetase isoenzymes in different Solanaceae plants and their relative antigenicities against antiglutamine synthetase from tomato leaf serum were studied. All the plants tested showed one glutamine synthetase isoenzyme except for Mandragora autumnalis, which showed two, after discontinuous polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and specific in situ assay. Antig...

Hairy root cultures were obtained from diploid and induced tetraploid plants of Datura stramonium and analyzed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. Twenty alkaloids (19 for diploid and 9 for tetraploid hairy root cultures) were identified. A new tropane ester 3-tigloyloxy-6-propionyloxy-7-hydroxytropane was identified on the basis of mass spectral data. Hyoscyamine was the main alkaloid in ...

Pot experiments were conducted to study the allelopathic effect of Datura stramonium residue on germination and growth characters purslane (Portulaca oleracea L). Experiments set as completely randomized design with four treatments three replications. Results indicated that concentration affect negatively. The lower level induced a stimulatory plant height, leaf area, shoot root, fresh dry weig...