Leaf-cutting ants learn to avoid plants initially harvested if they prove to be harmful for their symbiotic fungus once incorporated into the nest. At this point, waste particles removed from the fungus garden are likely to contain cues originating from both the unsuitable plant and the damaged fungus. We investigated whether leaf-cutting ant foragers learn to avoid unsuitable plants solely thr...

Cigarette butts and other postconsumer products from tobacco use are the most common waste elements picked up worldwide each year during environmental cleanups. Under the environmental principle of Extended Producer Responsibility, tobacco product manufacturers may be held responsible for collection, transport, processing and safe disposal of tobacco product waste (TPW). Legislation has been ap...

Most of classification, quality evaluation or grading of the flue-cured tobacco leaves are manually operated, which relies on the judgmental experience of experts, and inevitably limited by personal, physical and environmental factors. The classification and the quality evaluation are therefore subjective and experientially based. In this paper, an automatic classification method of tobacco lea...

Plants initially accepted by foraging leaf-cutting ants are later avoided if they prove unsuitable for their symbiotic fungus. Plant avoidance is mediated by the waste produced in the fungus garden soon after the incorporation of the unsuitable leaves, as foragers can learn plant odors and cues from the damaged fungus that are both present in the recently produced waste particles. We asked whet...

In this study, the recovery phenomenon following infection with Potato virus Y (PVY) was investigated in tobacco (Nicotiana tobaccum), tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) and potato (Solanum tuberosum) plants. In tobacco plants, infection of severe strains of PVY (PVYN or PVYN:O) induced conspicuous vein clearing and leaf deformation in the first three leaves above the inoculated leaves, but much mil...

It has been indicated that photosystem I (PSI) is susceptible to chilling-light stress in tobacco leaves, but the effect of growth light intensity on chilling-induced PSI photoinhibition in tobacco is unclear. We examined the effects of chilling temperature (4°C) associated with moderate light intensity (300 μmol photons m(-2) s(-1)) on the activities of PSI and photosystem II (PSII) in leaves ...

vp2 protein is the major host protective immunogen of infectious bursal disease virus (ibdv) of chickens. plants are now gaining widespread acceptance as a general platform for the large scale production of recombinant proteins including vaccine, antibodies and pharmaceuticals. in present study vp2 gene of an iranian isolate of ibdv was cloned under strong plant expression promoter camv35s and ...

To assess dermal absorption of nicotine from tobacco leaves in relation to Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS), urinary cotinine concentrations were measured in 80 male tobacco-growing farmers and in 40 healthy males (controls) who did not handle wet tobacco leaves in Kelantan, Malaysia. Among non-smokers, urinary cotinine levels in farmers were significantly higher than those of controls; farmers wit...

To reduce the labor cost and the workload required in the tobacco curing process, an intelligent tobacco curing control technique adopting color identification of the tobacco leaves is proposed. The HSI color space is used in color segmentation and the color recognition with fuzzy decision is used in the curing process. The curing controller can identify the curing stage by the color features o...

Plastomic replacement of the tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) Rubisco large subunit gene (rbcL) with that from sunflower (Helianthus annuus; rbcL(S)) produced tobacco(Rst) transformants that produced a hybrid Rubisco consisting of sunflower large and tobacco small subunits (L(s)S(t)). The tobacco(Rst) plants required CO(2) (0.5% v/v) supplementation to grow autotrophically from seed despite the subs...