BACKGROUND Traditionally, the essential oil of aromatic herbs is obtained using hydrodistillation (HD). Because the emitted volatile fraction plays a fundamental role in a plant's life, various novel techniques have been developed for its extraction from plants. Among these, headspace solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) can be used to obtain a rapid fingerprint of a plant's headspace. Daucus ...

Wound responses in plants have to be coordinated between organs so that locally reduced growth in a wounded tissue is balanced by appropriate growth elsewhere in the body. We used a JASMONATE ZIM DOMAIN 10 (JAZ10) reporter to screen for mutants affected in the organ-specific activation of jasmonate (JA) signaling in Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings. Wounding one cotyledon activated the reporter i...

The purpose of this experiment is to compare the growth and water consumption efficiency five garden plants (marigold (Tagetes erecta ‘Red Brocade’), moss-rose (Portulaca grandiflora ‘Sun Rose’), dahlia (Dahlia sp. ‘Double Opra’), gazania (Gazania splendens ‘New Day’), Indian blanket (Gaillardia pulchella. Dance’)) during warmer seasons year under various levels drought stress based on field ca...

As a plant shoot matures, it transitions through a series of growth phases in which successive aerial organs undergo distinct developmental changes. This process of phase change is known to be influenced by gibberellins (GAs). We report the identification of a putative transcription factor, GLABROUS INFLORESCENCE STEMS (GIS), which regulates aspects of shoot maturation in Arabidopsis thaliana. ...

A fast neutron-mutagenized population of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) Columbia-0 wild-type plants was screened for floral phenotypes and a novel mutant, termed hawaiian skirt (hws), was identified that failed to shed its reproductive organs. The mutation is the consequence of a 28 bp deletion that introduces a premature amber termination codon into the open reading frame of a putative F-b...

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.), a domesticated species that is the fourth most important world agricultural commodity, requires significant management to minimize the effects of herbivore and pathogen damage on crop yield. A wild relative, Solanum chacoense Bitt., has been of interest to plant breeders because it produces an abundance of novel steroidal glycoalkaloid compounds, leptines and lept...

As a devastating holoparasitic weed, Orobanche aegyptiaca Persoon. (Egyptian broomrape) causes serious damage to agricultural production and threatens economic development, which has raised widespread concern. The present study was conducted to determine whether lilies have the potential to be used as 'trap crops' for controlling O. aegyptiaca Persoon. In the experiments, the ability of three p...

All plant organs are derived from meristems. The shoot apical meristem (SAM) produces the aerial part of the plant. It has two main functions: the maintenance of a group of stem cells at the center of the meristem and the initiation of organs at its periphery. The organs are initiated in a regular spatial pattern, referred to as phyllotaxy, and are separated from the surrounding tissue by a bou...

Members of the KANADI gene family in Arabidopsis thaliana regulate abaxial identity and laminar growth of lateral organs. Promoter APETALA3-mediated ectopic expression of KANADI restricts petal expansion and was used in a genetic screen for factors involved in KANADI-mediated signaling. Through this screen, mutations in ETTIN (ETT; also known as Auxin Response Factor3 [ARF3]) were isolated as s...