Almonds (Prunus amygdalus) represent an important crop in most Mediterranean countries. A new and devastating disease of almond trees in Lebanon was recently reported, characterized by the development of severe witches'-brooms on which no flowers or fruits developed, and leading to tree death within a few years. A phytoplasma was detected in diseased trees by PCR amplification of rRNA operon se...

In a Comment recently published in Molecules [1], Prof. C. Wiart took issue with our identification of the plant species used in our work as Paulownia coreana. Although this name was assigned by H. Uyeki in 1925 [2], appears as such in handbooks of Korean flora [3], and examples of its use can be found in the recent literature [4–9], after reviewing the arguments and references presented in [1]...

The bacterial genus "Candidatus Phytoplasma" contains a group of insect-transmitted plant pathogens in the class Mollicutes. Here, we report a draft genome assembly and annotation of strain NCHU2014, which belongs to the 16SrII-A subgroup within this genus and is associated with purple coneflower witches' broom disease in Taiwan.

Phytoplasmas are plant pathogenic bacteria that have no cell wall and are responsible for major crop losses throughout the world. Phytoplasma-infected plants show a variety of symptoms and the mechanisms they use to physiologically alter the host plants are of considerable interest, but poorly understood. In this study we undertook a detailed analysis of Paulownia infected by Paulownia witches'...

Statistical mechanics is an asymptotic theory valid in the limit of an infinite number of degrees of freedom. The study of small-dimensional chaos, starting from the papers by Lorenz [1]and Henon and Heiles [2], raises the question: What is essential for the laws of statistical mechanics to be true —a large number of degrees of freedom or chaos? For ergodic Hamiltonian systems the answer was gi...

The multilayer multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree (ML-MCTDH) method is discussed and a fully general implementation for any number of layers based on the recursive ML-MCTDH algorithm given by Manthe [J. Chem. Phys. 128, 164116 (2008)] is presented. The method is applied first to a generalized Henon-Heiles (HH) hamiltonian. For 6D HH the overhead of ML-MCTDH makes the method slower than M...