We examined concentrations of barium (Ba), cadmium (Cd}, copper (Cu), iron (Fe}, lead (Pb), and zinc (Zn) in buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum}, com (Zea mays}, giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida), Pennsylvania smartweed (Polygonum pennsylvanicum }, and water hemp (Amaranthus rudis) seeds collected at the "3-Is" waterfowl impoundment at DePue Wildlife Management Area (DWMA}, DePue, Illinois, in the ...

BACKGROUND Brachytherapy with iodine-labeled seeds (I-seeds) implantation is increasingly being used to treat tumors because of its positional precision, minimal invasion, least damage to noncancerous tissue due to slow and continuous release of radioactivity and facilitation with modern medical imaging technologies. This study evaluates the survival and pain relief outcomes of the I-seeds impl...

Seeds dispersed by vertebrates can face potentially very different seed fate pathways. One of these is via vertebrates that pose little threat to the seed itself, either dropping the seed in the course of fruit handling or passing the seed relatively unharmed through the gut (‘benign dispersers’ or ‘legitimate’ dispersers of Schupp (1993)). Alternatively, seeds could be dispersed by vertebrates...

Riptortus pedestris (Fabricius) and Halyomorpha halys (Stål) cause injury to soybeans by piercing and sucking pods and seeds. Growers believe that new damage decreases near to harvest despite the occurrence of these bugs at that time. As this question has never been assessed, we evaluated two diets: a) mature soybean pods (dried shell + dried soybean seeds) and b) dried soybean seeds for the tw...

For life to survive outside the biosphere, it must be protected from UV light and other radiation by exterior shielding or through sufficient inherent resistance to survive without protection. We tested the plausibility of inherent resistance in plant seeds, reporting in a previous paper that Arabidopsis thaliana and tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) seeds exposed for 558 days outside the Internation...

Musk thistle is an invasive weed that is widely distributed throughout much of North America, including grasslands in temperate climates of the midwest USA. A series of laboratory and greenhouse experiments were conducted to determine the effect of various environmental factors on germination of musk thistle seeds. In temperature-fluctuation experiments, seed germination was greater than 65% in...

Seeds lose their viability when they are exposed to high temperature and moisture content (MC) during storage. The expression and metabolism of proteins plays a critical role in seed resistance to heat stress. However, the proteome response to heat stress in oat (Avena sativa) seeds during storage has not been revealed. To understand mechanisms of heat stress acclimation and tolerance in oat se...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The smoke-derived compound karrikinolide (KAR(1)) shows significant potential as a trigger for the synchronous germination of seeds in a variety of plant-management contexts, from weed seeds in paddocks, to native seeds when restoring degraded lands. Understanding how KAR(1) interacts with seed physiology is a necessary precursor to the development of the compound as an effi...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Most studies on seed position-dependent effects have focused on germination characteristics. Our aim was to determine the effects of seed position in the spikelet on differences in timing of germination and on the ecological life history of the grass Eremopyrum distans in its cold desert habitat. METHODS For seeds in three spikelet positions, morphology, mass and dormancy/...

We tested whether compounds in ripe Solanum americanum fruits affect gut retention time of S. americanum seeds in Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum). Glycoalkaloids were of special interest because they commonly occur in ripe Solanum fruits and are associated with diarrhea in humans. Also, we determined the influence of gut retention time and the presence/absence of two glycoalkaloids, a-sola...