Light plays a vital role on the growth and development of plant. On the base of white light with high color rendering to the benefit of human survival and life, we proposed to improve "color rendering" of LED lighting for accelerating the growth of lettuce. Seven spectral LED lights were adopted to irradiate the lettuces under 150 μmol·m-2·s-1 for a 16 hd-1 photoperiod. The leaf area and number...

A population of 50 independent transgenic lettuces transformed with a nitrate reductase coding sequence under the control of the 35S promoter was studied. None of them showed significantly lower nitrate levels when compared with the untransformed plants, despite the presence of nitrate reductase (NR) activity that derives from the transgene in at least four of the transformants. No repercussion...

It is often taken for granted that products will be available to buy in the shops. The cornucopia of goods that is available in a hypermarket or a department store sometimes means that we forget how the products were supplied. We expect our lettuces to be fresh, the new Playstation to be available on launch day and our clothes to be in good condition and ready to wear. With the introduction of ...

The purpose of this article is to investigate the applications of hydroponic wastewater management systems (HWMS) as wastewater treatment facilities for the Dead Sea vicinity. In addition, it aims at managing the wastewater through generating commercially valuable plants using a proposed HWMS. A commercial hydroponic system was adapted for studying the potential heavy metals removal from primar...

20 Modern agricultural landscapes favour crop pests: herbivores benefit from resource 21 concentration and/or the absence of natural enemies in large areas of intensively farmed fields 22 interspersed by small fragments of natural or non-crop habitats. 23 Conservation biological control (CBC) aims at increasing the functional diversity of 24 agricultural landscapes to make them more hospitable ...

Several studies have reported on the detection of perchlorate (ClO(4)(-)) in edible leafy vegetables irrigated with Colorado River water. However, there is no information on spinach as related to ClO(4)(-) in irrigation water nor on the effect of other anions on ClO(4)(-) uptake. A greenhouse ClO(4)(-) uptake experiment using spinach was conducted to investigate the impact of presence of chlori...

As an initial step to mapping quantitative trait loci for species differences and adaptive radiation of insular endemics in Macaronesia, a genetic linkage map was constructed from an intergeneric backcross between Lactucosonchus webbii and Sonchus radicatus, core members of the tree lettuces in the Macaronesian Islands. A total of 152 amplified fragment length polymorphism markers were mapped i...

Extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Enterobacteriaceae with Cefotaximase-München (CTX-M) enzymes are rapidly increasing worldwide and pose a threat to health care. ESBLs with CTX-M enzymes have been isolated from animals and different food products, but it is unknown if food imported from the Mediterranean area may be a possible reservoir of these bacteria. During 2007-2008, swab sam...