BACKGROUND Salvia miltiorrhiza (Danshen) is one of the most widely used medicinal herbs in traditional Chinese medicine. Locality-level and cultivar identification is of great importance not only for protecting highest therapeutic effectiveness of Daodi Danshen, but also for the genetic conservation and utilization of existing S. miltiorrhiza populations. RESULTS Intron polymorphisms includin...

Plums are climacteric fruits: their ripening is associated with a burst of ethylene production and respiration rate. Stone fruits, including plum, have a distinct pattern of growth and development, described as a double sigmoid pattern. In order to understand the developmental control of ethylene perception in plum, four ethylene perception and signal transduction components (EPSTCs) were chara...

Elucidation of the rice genome is expected to broaden our understanding of genes related to the agronomic characteristics and the genetic relationship among cultivars. In this study, we conducted whole-genome sequencings of 6 cultivars, including 5 temperate japonica cultivars and 1 tropical japonica cultivar (Moroberekan), by using next-generation sequencing (NGS) with Nipponbare genome as a r...

Safflower is an important, traditional, multipurpose oil crop. This was to investigate the effect of different salinity levels on morphological, physiological, biochemical and antioxidant response of two safflower cultivars (Carthamus tinctorius L. cultivar TSF1 and cultivar SM) differing in salt tolerance. Salinity stress (0.0%, 1.0%, 1.5% and 2.0% of NaCl) was induced to safflower plants afte...

Potatoes are usually a high-glycaemic index (GI) food. Finding a low-GI potato and developing a screening method for finding low-GI cultivars are both health and agricultural priorities. The aims of the present study were to screen the commonly used and newly introduced cultivars of potatoes, in a bid to discover a low-GI potato, and to describe the relationship between in vitro starch digestib...

An assay technique, homogeneous enzyme immunoassay, is described for the quantitative determination of morphine derivatives in biological fluids. An enzyme is labeled with morphine. When the enzymelabeled morphine is bound by antimorphine antibodies, the enzyme is rendered inactive. Free morphine competes with enzyme-morphine for antibody binding sites preventing inhibition of enzyme activity. ...

*Introgression of cultivar alleles into wild plant populations via crop-wild hybridization is primarily governed by their fitness effects as well as those of linked loci. The fitness of crop-wild hybrids is often dependent on environmental factors, but less is understood about how aspects of the environment affect individual cultivar alleles. *This study investigated the effects of naturally oc...