BACKGROUND AND AIMS Cassava (Manihot esculenta), a major food staple in the tropics and subtropics, thrives even in environments undergoing threatening climate change. To satisfy the increasing demand for crop improvement and overcome the limitations of conventional breeding, the introduction of inbreeding techniques such as the production of doubled haploid lines via androgenesis or gynogenesi...

We have examined the effect of the protein phosphatase inhibitors okadaic acid and microcystin on pollen-pistil interactions in Brassica. Inhibitor-treated flowers or floral buds were pollinated with untreated pollen and examined for pollen tube growth by fluorescence microscopy. Our results show that type 1 or type 2A serine/threonine phosphatases play a crucial role in the pollination respons...

Mature pollen from most plant species is metabolically quiescent; however, after pollination, it germinates quickly and gives rise to a pollen tube to transport sperms into the embryo sac. Because methods for collecting a large amount of in vitro germinated pollen grains for transcriptomics and proteomics studies from model plants of Arabidopsis and rice are not available, molecular information...

In many gynodioecious species the nuclear inheritance of male fertility is complex and involves multiple (restorer) genes. In addition to restoring plants from the female (male sterile) to the hermaphrodite (male fertile) state, these genes are also thought to play a role in the determination of the quantity of pollen produced by hermaphrodites. The more restorer alleles a hermaphroditic plant ...

Pollination is only one of the many events comprising the plant development cycle; however, it is extremely important for yield where seed is required. Although successful fertilization depends on a number of environmental and endogenous factors, including climate and plant nutritional status, a sufficient quantity of pollen must reach the receptive stigma in order to enhance fertilization pote...

Sexual reproduction is a critical process in the life-cycle of plants and very sensitive to environmental perturbations. To better understand the effect of high temperature on plant reproduction, we cultivated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) plants in continuous mild heat. Under this condition we observed a simultaneous reduction in pollen viability and appearance of anthers with pistil-like stru...

• Fusion of floral carpels (syncarpy) in angiosperms is thought to have allowed for significant improvements in offspring quantity and quality in syncarpous species over gymnosperms and apocarpous (free-carpelled) angiosperms. Given the disadvantages of apocarpy, it remains an evolutionary puzzle why many angiosperm lineages with free carpels (apocarpy) have been so successful and why some line...

Eusocial Apis mellifera colonies depend on queen longevity and brood viability to survive, as the is sole reproductive individual maturing replenishes shorter-lived worker bees. Production of many crops rely both pesticides bee pollination improve crop quantity quality, yet sublethal impacts this pesticide exposure often poorly understood. We investigated resiliency queens their after one month...

In habitats where resource availability declines during the growing season, selection may favor early-flowering individuals. Under such ephemerally favorable conditions, late-blooming species (and individuals) may be particularly vulnerable to resource limitation of seed production. In California, a region prone to seasonal drought, members of the annual genus Clarkia are among the last to flow...

"Favism" defines an acute hemolytic episode and its sequelae following ingestion of the bean or inhalation of the pollen of Vicia faba (broad bean or fava bean) in an individual probably sensitized by previous contact of a similar nature. The features of this syndrome and its potentially widespread occurrence in this country,t together with an excellent account of its prevalence in Italy, were ...