objective: castor (ricinuscommunis l.) is an industrial oilseed that belongs to the family euphorbiaceae. castor is believed to be originated in east africa probably ethiopia. although ethiopia is known as a primary diversity for castor the knowledge on nature and extent of variation of the indigenous germplasm is limited. the present test was conducted to study the nature and extent of variabi...

Plants often grow in clusters of various sizes and have a variable number of flowers per inflorescence. This small-scale spatial clustering affects insect foraging strategies and plant reproductive success. In our study, we aimed to determine how visitation rate and foraging behaviour of pollinators depend on the number of flowers per plant and on the size of clusters of multiple plants using D...

Phenotypic matches between plants and their pollinators often are interpreted as examples of reciprocal selection and adaptation. For the two co-occurring plant species, Heliconia bihai and H. caribaea in the Eastern Caribbean, we evaluated for five populations over 2 years the strength and direction of natural selection on corolla length and number of bracts per inflorescence. These plant trai...

drought stress is one of the important problems in arid and semi_arid regions. drought stress take place in plants when available water is lesser than evapotranspiration. in order to evaluate the effect of drought stress on morphological traits and yield of three medicinal plants an experiment was carried out during the 2010 year in research greenhouse of faculity of agriculture, ferdowsi unive...

Yield is one of the most important yet complex crop traits. To improve our understanding of the genetic basis of yield establishment, and to identify candidate genes responsible for yield improvement in Brassica napus, we performed genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for seven yield-determining traits [main inflorescence pod number (MIPN), branch pod number (BPN), pod number per plant (PNP),...

to evaluate the effects of presence of insect pollinators on quantity and quality of seeds of two common cultivars of onion (allium cepa l.), namely red azar shahr and yellow sweet spanish, an experiment in a factorial randomized complete block design was carried out at two sites. bulbs of equal size were planted with plant to plant 35 cm and row to row 50 cm spacing. at each site, experimental...

five genotypes of chickpea as a half diallel crossed with each other, in 2008, 5 parents and 10 progenies were planted as randomized complete block design and some traits including days to podding, basal pod height, number of pods per plant, number of double seed pods per plant, number of single seed pods per plant, number of empty pods per plant, seeds per plant and seed yield per plant were e...

Much of the cost associated with marker discovery for marker assisted breeding (MAB) can be eliminated if a diverse, segregating population is generated, genotyped, and made available to the global breeding community. Herein, we present an example of a hybrid, wild-derived family of the octoploid strawberry that can be used by other breeding programs to economically find and tag useful genes fo...

Inflorescence morphology is incredibly diverse. This diversity of form has been a fruitful source of inquiry for plant morphologists for more than a century. Work in the grasses (Poaceae), the tomato family (Solanaceae), and Arabidopsis thaliana (Brassicaceae) has led to a richer understanding of the molecular genetics underlying this diversity. The character of individual meristems, a combinat...