The high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method of Flores and Galston (1982 Plant Physiol 69: 701) for the separation and quantitation of benzoylated polyamines in plant tissues has been widely adopted by other workers. However, due to previously unrecognized problems associated with the derivatization of agmatine, this important intermediate in plant polyamine metabolism cannot be q...

Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV), a member of the genus Begomovirus, is one of the most important viruses of cultivated tomatoes worldwide, mainly causing yellowing and curling of leaves with stunting in plants. TYLCV causes severe problems in sub-tropical and tropical countries, as well as in Korea. However, the mechanism of TYLCV infection remains unclear, although the function of each v...

A large number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain the adaptive significance and evolution of the endophagous-feeding mode, nutritional benefits being considered to be one of the main advantages. Leaf-mining insects should feed on most nutritional tissues and avoid tissues with high structural and/or biochemical plant defences. This selective feeding behaviour could furthermore be reinf...

Boron (B) is an essential micronutrient for vascular plants. The function of B has been demonstrated to cross-link monomeric rhamnogalacturonan II (mRG-II) to form dimeric RG-II-borate (dRG-II-B), and thus to stabilize plant cell walls. The dRG-II-B to total RG-II ratio in the cell walls of pumpkin hydroponically grown under various low-B conditions was analyzed to evaluate its applicability to...

Drought stress is a condition that in specific climate contexts results in insufficient water availability and often limits plant productivity through perturbing development and reducing plant growth and survival. Plants use senescence of old leaves and dormancy of buds and seeds to survive extreme environmental conditions. The plant hormone ABA accumulates after drought stress, and increases p...

Dried ground plant tissues from 20 leguminous species were mixed with Meloidogyne incognita-infested soil at 1, 2 or 2.5, and 5% (w/w) and incubated for 1 week at room temperature (21 to 27 degrees C). Tomato ('Rutgers') seedlings were transplanted into infested soil to determine nematode viability. Most tissues reduced gall numbers below the non-amended controls. The tissue amendments that wer...

Endophytes are microorganisms that live within plant tissues without causing symptoms of disease. They are important components of plant microbiomes. Endophytes interact with, and overlap in function with, other core microbial groups that colonize plant tissues, e.g., mycorrhizal fungi, pathogens, epiphytes, and saprotrophs. Some fungal endophytes affect plant growth and plant responses to path...

Computed tomography remains strongly underused in plant sciences despite its high potential in delivering detailed 3D phenotypical information because of the low X-ray absorption of most plant tissues. Existing protocols to study soft tissues display poor performance, especially when compared to those used on animals. More efficient protocols to study plant material are therefore needed. Flower...

The study of plant development relies on techniques for the accurate visualization of plant tissue structure to understand cell patterning and patterns of gene expression. Current techniques for threedimensional (3D) imaging are limited with respect to the thickness of tissue that may be studied and the resolution that may be achieved. Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) of living plant t...

In this paper, we present PlantGL, an open-source graphic toolkit for the creation, simulation and analysis of 3D virtual plants. This C++ geometric library is embedded in the Python language which makes it a powerful user-interactive platform for plant modeling in various biological application domains. PlantGL makes it possible to build and manipulate geometric models of plants or plant parts...