All plants flower late in their life cycle. For example, in Arabidopsis, the shoot undergoes a transition and produces reproductive flowers after the adult phase of vegetative growth. Much is known about genetic and environmental processes that control flowering time in mature plants. However, little is understood about the mechanisms that prevent plants from flowering much earlier during embry...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Development of insect resistance to synthetic pesticides, high operational cost and environmental pollution have created the need for developing alternative approaches to control vector-borne diseases. In the present study, larvicidal activity of flavonoid extracts of different parts of Vitex negundo (Linnaeus) and Andrographis paniculata (Nees) have been studied against...

fumigant toxicity of various doses of essential oils (185.2, 370.4, 555.5, 740.7, 925.4, 1111.1, and 1296.3 µl/l water) from five officinal plants, including rosemary (rosmarinus officinalis), lavender (lavandula vera), fennel (foeniculum vulgare), tarragon (artemisia dracunculus)and summer savory (satureja hortensis)on two stored products pests, cowpea weevil (callosobruchus maculatus) and red...

Pollinator and flower morphology are important factors in structuring the plant-pollinator relationship. A pollinator’s morphology may influence aspects of its diet. Flower-visiting bats are important pollinators but very little is known about what influences their interactions with food plants. I examined the role of morphology in the partitioning of food resources for five species of flower-v...

In dioecious plants, reproductive efforts of male and female plants can be differentially affected by herbivory due to sex-specific allocation and re-modulation of resources. Here, we investigate the effects of foliar herbivory by the polyphagous species Spodoptera littoralis (Boisduval) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) on male and female reproductive traits of Silene latifolia (Poir.) (Caryophyllaceae...

global optimization methods play an important role to solve many real-world problems. flower pollination algorithm (fp) is a new nature-inspired algorithm, based on the characteristics of flowering plants. in this paper, a new hybrid optimization method called hybrid flower pollination algorithm (fppso) is proposed. the method combines the standard flower pollination algorithm (fp) with the par...

The objective of this study was to examine and demonstrate how harvesting age (flower age) contribute to the variations in the quality of Echinacea purpurea (L.) Moench. The effects of different flower developmental stages on caffeic acid derivatives and isobutylamide content are described. These phytochemicals were extracted from fresh plants with 60% ethanol and quantified by the HPLC analysi...