The benefits of increased safety and cost-effectiveness make vegetable crops appropriate systems for the production and delivery of pharmaceutical proteins. In particular, Solanaceae edible crops could be inexpensive biofactories for oral vaccines and other pharmaceutical proteins that can be ingested as minimally processed extracts or as partially purified products. The field of crop plant bio...

Four new species of "non-spiny" Solanum from South America are described. Solanumlongifilamentum Särkinen & P.Gonzáles, sp. nov. (Morelloid clade) is widespread from Ecuador to Bolivia and is most similar to Solanummacrotonum Dunal from Central and northern South America. Solanumantisuyo Särkinen & S.Knapp, sp. nov. (Morelloid clade) is found on the eastern Andean slopes in Ecuador, Peru and Bo...

We report herein the application of a set of algorithms to identify a large number (2869) of single-copy orthologs (COSII), which are shared by most, if not all, euasterid plant species as well as the model species Arabidopsis. Alignments of the orthologous sequences across multiple species enabled the design of "universal PCR primers," which can be used to amplify the corresponding orthologs f...

Plants have evolved an elaborate innate immune system against invading pathogens. Within this system, intracellular nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) immune receptors are known play critical roles in effector-triggered immunity (ETI) plant defense. We performed genome-wide identification and classification of NLR-coding sequences from the genomes of pepper, tomato, and potato using f...

Recent progress in understanding the phylogeny of the economically important plant family Solanaceae makes this an ideal time to develop models for linking the new data on plant genomics with the huge diversity of naturally occurring species in the family. Phylogenetics provides the framework with which to investigate these linkages but, critically, good species-level descriptive resources for ...

Four known tropane alkaloids were isolated from the leaves of the endemic Chilean plant Latua pubiflora (Solanaceae). For the first time; 3alpha-cinnamoyloxitropane and apoatropine are reported in this plant. Scopolamine and hyoscyamine were previously reported.

The identification of genomic regions with sufficient variation to elucidate fine-scale relationships among closely related species is a major goal of phylogenetic systematics. However, the accumulation of such multi-locus data sets brings its own challenges, given that gene trees do not necessarily represent the true species tree. Using genomic tools developed for Solanum (Solanaceae), we have...

One of the most remarkable manifestations of plant evolution is the diversity for floral branching systems. These "inflorescences" arise from stem cell populations in shoot meristems that mature gradually to reproductive states in response to environmental and endogenous signals. The morphology of the shoot meristem maturation process is conserved across distantly related plants, raising the qu...

Sixteen species of Jaborosa (Solanaceae), including eight endemic to Argentina, were studied karyologically. The numbers n = 12 and/or 2n = 24 were found in all species, the majority of the cases being new reports. Mitotic chromosomes were smallto medium-sized, the average length varying from 2.95 to 4.93 mm. All species had one to three chromosome pairs with satellites. The karyotypes, obtaine...

the methanolic extract of whole plants of solanum nigrum l. was investigated for anti-inflammatory activity on the experimental animal models. the methanolic extract at a concentration of 100 mg.kg-1 and 200 mg.kg-1, p.o. showed the significant dose dependent anti-inflammatory activity in carrageenin and egg white induced hind paw oedema in rats. anti-inflammatory activity of the tested extract...