RELATED INFORMATION For more information about P. patens as a model organism, see The Moss Physcomitrella patens: A Novel Model System for Plant Development and Genomic Studies (Cove et al. 2009a). The growth of protonemal tissue is described in Culturing the Moss Physcomitrella patens (Cove et al. 2009b), and a method for isolation of P. patens protoplasts is found in Isolation and Regeneratio...

Among flowering plants, animals commonly act as pollinators. We showed that fertile moss shoots attract springtails and mites, which in turn carry moss sperm, thereby enhancing the fertilization process. Previously, fertilization of mosses was thought to depend on the capacity of individual sperm to swim through a continuous water layer. The role of microarthropods in moss fertilization resembl...

EIREN K. JACOBSON, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0208, U.S.A.; KARIN A. FORNEY, Marine Mammal and Turtle Divison, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 110 Shaffer Road, Santa Cruz, California 95060, U.S.A.; JAMES T. HARVEY, ...

Agriculture disrupts all freshwater systems hugely from their pristine states. The former reductionist concept of pollution was of examining individual effects of particular substances on individual taxa or sub-communities in freshwater systems, an essentially ecotoxicological concept. It is now less useful than a more holistic approach that treats the impacts on the system as a whole and inclu...

BACKGROUND Efficient targeting to appropriate cell organelles is one of the bottlenecks for the production of recombinant proteins in plant systems. A common practice is to use the native secretory signal peptide of the heterologous protein to be produced. Though general features of secretion signals are conserved between plants and animals, the broad sequence variability among signal peptides ...

The health of several East Antarctic moss-beds is declining as liquid water availability is reduced due to recent environmental changes. Consequently, a noninvasive and spatially explicit method is needed to assess the vigour of mosses spread throughout rocky Antarctic landscapes. Here, we explore the possibility of using near-distance imaging spectroscopy for spatial assessment of moss-bed hea...

A novel technique suitable for noninvasive measurements of moss water content is presented. In this paper, colour image sensing is applied for measuring moss water content. Sunagoke moss Rhacomitrium canescens has been utilized as an active greening material to mitigate the urban heat island effect. The goal of this paper is to develop an intelligent image analysis system for water irrigation o...

This paper aims at evaluating heavy metals (HM) concentrations in modelled atmospheric deposition and biomonitors. The model LOTOS-EUROS (LE) yielded data on HM deposition at a spatial resolution of 25 km by 25 km throughout Europe. The European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) provided model calculations on 50 km by 50 km grids. Corresponding data on HM concentration in moss, leaves,...

Over the past two decades, the moss Physcomitrella patens has been developed from scratch to a model species in basic research and in biotechnology. A fully sequenced genome, outstanding possibilities for precise genome-engineering via homologous recombination (knockout moss), a certified GMP production in moss bioreactors, successful upscaling to 500 L wave reactors, excellent homogeneity of p...