The fungus Magnaporthe oryzae is a serious pathogen of rice and other grasses. Telomeric restriction fragments in Magnaporthe isolates that infect perennial ryegrass (prg) are hotspots for genomic rearrangement and undergo frequent, spontaneous alterations during fungal culture. The telomeres of rice-infecting isolates are very stable by comparison. Sequencing of chromosome ends from a number o...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Recent biodiversity research has focused on ecosystem processes, but less is known about responses of populations of individual plant species to changing community diversity and implications of genetic variation within species. To address these issues, effects of plant community diversity on the performance of different cultivars of Lolium perenne were analysed. METHODS Po...

In the March issue of this journal there appeared under 'Medical News' (p. 148; an abstract from an article by Brinton) an account of an epidemic at Aden caused by the seed of Lolium temulentum, a weed which grows in wheat fields. The wheat was brought from Abyssinia and milled locally by machinery. The consumption of the product made the inhabitants go down with symptoms of acute intoxication....

Mineral carbonation of basic silicate minerals regulates atmospheric CO(2) on geological time scales by locking up carbon. Mining and spreading onto the earth's surface of fast-weathering silicates, such as olivine, has been proposed to speed up this natural CO(2) sequestration ('enhanced weathering'). While agriculture may offer an existing infrastructure, weathering rate and impacts on soil a...

B. Nielsen*, S.M. Thamsborg, H.R. Andersen, T. Kristensen Organic Animal Health and Production, Department of Animal Science and Animal Health, Royal Veterinary Agricultural University, Groennegaardsvej 2, DK-1870 Frederiksberg C, Denmark Department of Animal Nutrition and Physiology, Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Foulum, Postbox 50, 8830 Tjele, Denmark Department of Agricultural S...

Tillering is defined as the process of above-ground shoot production by a single plant. The number of grass tillers is one of the most important parameters in ecology and breeding studies. The number of tillers is usually determined by manually counting the separated shoots from a single plant. Unfortunately, this method is too time-consuming. In this study, a new method for counting grass till...

13-17 ABSTRACT Infection with endophytic fungi (Acremonium spp.) was detected in seeds of wild populations of perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne) collected in France by private breeding companies and INRA. In total, 262 populations were examined and 70% contained Acremonium. It is worth noticing that most populations are endophyte infected but generally endophyte infection rates per population ...

ABSTRACT Perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne) was inoculated with urediniospores of Puccinia graminis subsp. graminicola at four stages of reproductive tiller development. All developmental stages, from expansion of the penultimate leaf through anthesis, were equally susceptible to infection measured as number of pustules per total inoculated plant area. However, within each stage from boot thro...

BACKGROUND When applied at the correct plant stage and dose, herbicides are highly toxic to plants. At reduced, low herbicide doses (below the recommended dose) plants can survive and display continuous and quantitative variation in dose-survival responses. Recurrent (directional) selection studies can reveal whether such a phenotypic variation in plant survival response to low herbicide dose i...