Plants propagate electrical signals in response to artificial wounding. However, little is known about the electrophysiological responses of the phloem to wounding, and whether natural damaging stimuli induce propagating electrical signals in this tissue. Here, we used living aphids and the direct current (DC) version of the electrical penetration graph (EPG) to detect changes in the membrane p...

The ocs-elements comprise a family of related 20-base pair DNA sequences with dyad symmetry that are functional components of the promoters of several genes introduced into the plant nucleus by Agrobacterium transformation or infection by DNA viruses. We describe the isolation and characterization of a maize cDNA that encodes a protein, OCSBF-1, that binds specifically to ocs-element sequences....

abstract one way of the increasing saline tolerance in citrus plants is grafting of sensitive commercial cultivars on to tolerant rootstocks. sweet lime (citrus limetta) is one of the most sensitive species to salinity of soil and water, and under such conditions, drastic reduction of both vegetative and yield occured. this reaserch was conducted in completely randomaized design with factorial ...

In this study, the alleviation effect of exogenous calcium (Ca) against cadmium (Cd) toxicity to growth, photosynthetic characteristics, antioxidant properties, and absorption of nutrients was explored in nutrient solution-cultured garlic seedlings. The results indicated that Cd significantly inhibited the growth of garlic seedlings as well as reduced the chlorophyll content, net photosynthetic...

Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) polyphenol oxidases (PPOs) are encoded by a seven-member gene family that exhibits complex patterns of differential expression during growth and differentiation. Antisense down-regulation of constitutive and induced PPO expression results in hypersusceptibility to pathogens, suggesting a critical role for PPO-mediated phenolic oxidation in plant defense. H...

Constitutive promoters have been widely used in crop biotechnology applications. Tissue-specific or inducible promoters, however, have advantages in some cases. We isolated the 731-bp 5' flanking sequence of a potato (Solanum tuberosum) gene, encoding ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (rubisco) activase (RCA), which was isolated by genome walking. By using GUS as a reporter and wi...

We examined how nutrient release by two common stream detritivores, Asellus and Gammarus, was affected by the consumption of aspen leaf litter from trees grown under elevated CO2. We measured excretory release of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), ammonia (NH4), and soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP) from consumers fed senesced leaves of Populus tremuloides (trembling aspen) trees grown under eleva...

E2F transcription factors regulate genes expressed at the G1/S boundary of the cell division cycle in higher eukaryotes. Although animal E2F proteins and their target promoters have been studied extensively, little is known about how these factors regulate plant promoters. An earlier study identified two E2F consensus binding sites in the promoter of a Nicotiana benthamiana gene encoding prolif...

The antioxidant, phytochemical and nutritional properties of acetone, methanol and aqueous extracts of the leaves of Ocimum gratissimum (Linn) were investigated to evaluate the therapeutic and nutritional potential of the leaves of this plant. The antioxidant of the plant extracts were assessed against 1,1-Diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and 2,2-azinobis-(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid...

MINIMUM QUARTET INCONSISTENCY (MQI) Input: A set S of n taxa and a set QS of quartet topologies such that there is exactly one topology for every quartet set corresponding to S, and an integer k. Question: Is there an evolutionary tree T where the leaves are bijectively labeled by the elements from S such that the set of quartet topologies induced by T differs from QS in at most k quartet topol...