Most of the shell material in snails is composed of calcium carbonate but the organic shell matrix determines the properties of calcium carbonate crystals. It has been shown that the deposition of calcium carbonate is affected by the ingestion of organic compounds. We hypothesize that organic compounds not synthesized by the snails are important for shell strength and must be obtained from the ...

In deceptive pollination, insects are bamboozled into performing nonrewarded pollination. A prerequisite for the evolutionary stability in such systems is that the plants manage to generate a perfect sensory impression of a desirable object in the insect nervous system [1]. The study of these plants can provide important insights into sensory preference of their visiting insects. Here, we prese...

Lily Jan is Jack and DeLoris Lange Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She began her long-term collaboration with her husband Yuh Nung Jan when they both took the neurobiology summer courses at Cold Spring Harbor (CSH) right after they finished graduate school at Caltech in 1974;...

Anthers of lily and trillium were followed with respect to variations in protein and soluble sulfhydryls during meiosis and mitosis of the sporogenous tissue. In lily, the meiotic and mitotic cycles are each preceded by a rise in soluble --SH; in trillium there is only one rise which precedes meiosis. During division there is a marked drop in soluble --SH and a rise in soluble disulfides. Prote...

Anthers of lily and trillium were followed with respect to variations in protein and soluble sulfhydryls during meiosis and mitosis of the sporogenous tissue. In lily, the meiotic and mitotic cycles are each preceded by a rise in soluble --SH; in trillium there is only one rise which precedes meiosis. During division there is a marked drop in soluble --SH and a rise in soluble disulfides. Prote...

Lily species (Lilium spp.) are highly appreciated for their aesthetic value as cut flowers or pot plants and have been among the most important ornamental species worldwide for a long time. Numerous lily breeding programs aim at the establishment of novel phenotypes with higher market values. Until now these programs are based mainly on segregation and selection of natural variants and interspe...

Vacuolar sorting receptors (VSRs) are type-I integral membrane proteins that mediate biosynthetic protein traffic in the secretory pathway to the vacuole, whereas secretory carrier membrane proteins (SCAMPs) are type-IV membrane proteins localizing to the plasma membrane and early endosome (EE) or trans-Golgi network (TGN) in the plant endocytic pathway. As pollen tube growth is an extremely po...