Pollen transport by water-flow (hydrophily) is a typical, and almost exclusive, adaptation of plants to life in the marine environment. It is thought that, unlike terrestrial environments, animals are not involved in pollination in the sea. The male flowers of the tropical marine angiosperm Thalassia testudinum open-up and release pollen in mucilage at night when invertebrate fauna is active. H...

Flowering is controlled by a variety of interrelated mechanisms. In many plants, the environment controls the production of a floral stimulus, which moves from the leaves to the shoot apex. Apices can become committed to the continuous production of flowers after the receipt of sufficient amounts of floral stimulus. However, in some plants, the commitment to continued flower production is evide...

The new natural polyamine conjugate 1N,5N,10N,14N-tetracoumaroyl spermine (tetracoumaroyl spermine) recently isolated from chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla L.) flower heads is applicable for the treatment of several human disorders such as depression and anxiety. High variability in the level of tetracoumaroyl spermine is found in commercial tisanes. Accumulation of tetracoumaroyl spermine was ...

The class B organ identity genes, APETALA3 and PISTILLATA, are required to specify petal and stamen identity in the Arabidopsis flower. We show here that the activities of these two genes are sufficient to specify petals and stamens in flowers, in combination with the class A and C genes, respectively. Flowers of plants constitutively expressing both PISTILLATA and APETALA3 under the control of...

Trifolium pratense (red clover) and T. repens (white clover) edible flowers were investigated for their chemical profile and health properties. The total phenols and flavonoids contents were evaluated. Quercetin, kaempferol, luteolin, rutin, and myricetin were used as markers and quantified by HPLC. The antioxidant effects were investigated by using different in vitro assays. Moreover, α-amylas...

Based on the empirical or theoretical qualitative information about the relationship between response variable and covariates, we propose a new approach to model polynomial regression using a shape restricted regression after estimating the direction by sufficient dimension reduction. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate that in the absence of prior information other than the shape constr...

Correlation structure contains important information about longitudinal data. Existing sufficient dimension reduction approaches assuming independence may lead to substantial loss of efficiency. We apply the quadratic inference function to incorporate the correlation information and apply the transformation method to recover the central subspace. The proposed estimators are shown to be consiste...

Given their small size and high metabolism, nectar bats need to be able to quickly locate flowers during foraging bouts. Chiropterophilous plants depend on these bats for their reproduction, thus they also benefit if their flowers can be easily located, and we would expect that floral traits such as odor and shape have evolved to maximize detection by bats. However, relatively little is known a...

We performed field experiments to measure the relative importance of olfactory and visual cues in nectar foraging by wild tobacco hornworm moths, Manduca sexta (Lepidoptera, Sphingidae) in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, U.S.A. We manipulated flowers of sacred Datura (Datura wrightii; Solanaceae) to experimentally decouple floral scent from visual display and presented these cues to free-flying ...