Many crop pests rely on resources out of crop fields; understanding how they colonize the fields is an important factor to develop integrated pest management. In particular, the time of crop colonization and damage severity might be determined by pest movements between fields and non-crop areas. Notably, the pollen beetle, Brassicogethes aeneus, previously named Meligethes aeneus, one of the mo...

Neonicotinoid residues in nectar and pollen from crop plants have been implicated as one of the potential factors causing the declines of honey bee populations. Median residues of thiamethoxam in pollen collected from honey bees after foraging on flowering seed treated maize were found to be between 1 and 7 µg/kg, median residues of the metabolite CGA322704 (clothianidin) in the pollen were bet...

The Bombus sensu stricto species complex is a widespread group of cryptic bumblebee species which are important pollinators of many crops and wild plants. These cryptic species have, until now, largely been grouped together in ecological studies, and so little is known about their individual colony densities, foraging ranges or habitat requirements, which can be influenced by land use at a land...

The mechanism associated with improvement of soil nutritional status by oilseed rape crop, leading to better performance of rice crop, in rice-oilseed rape cropping systems is little known. The present study was aimed to test the hypothesis that earthworm casts produced during oilseed rape-growing season have positive effects on grain yield and fertilizer nitrogen (N) utilization in the subsequ...

plant fatty acyl-acyl carrier protein thioesterase (fat) is a major enzyme regulating the amount and composition of fatty acids in lipids. in this study, one type of cdna, corresponding to the fatty acyl-acyl carrier protein (acyl-acp) thioesterase (fat) enzyme, was isolated from the seed of brassica napus cv. ningyou12. blast results revealed that the cdna identified highly with the fatb class...

Spectral feature fitting (SFF) is a commonly used strategy for hyperspectral imagery analysis to discriminate ground targets. Compared to other image analysis techniques, SFF does not secure higher accuracy in extracting image information in all circumstances. Multi range spectral feature fitting (MRSFF) from ENVI software allows user to focus on those interesting spectral features to yield bet...

Sucrose is the principal transported product of photosynthesis from source leaves to sink organs. SUTs/SUCs (sucrose transporters or sucrose carriers) and SWEETs (Sugars Will Eventually be Exported Transporters) play significant central roles in phloem loading and unloading. SUTs/SUCs and SWEETs are key players in sucrose translocation and are associated with crop yields. The SUT/SUC and SWEET ...

Phelipanche ramosa is a parasitic plant that infects numerous crops worldwide. In Western Europe it recently expanded to a new host crop, oilseed rape, in which it can cause severe yield losses. We developed 13 microsatellite markers for P. ramosa using next-generation 454 sequencing data. The polymorphism at each locus was assessed in a sample of 96 individuals collected in France within 6 fie...

Oilseed crops are major sources of oils for human nutrition, and an increasing proportion is also being utilized for industrial purposes. Recent advances in our understanding of the basic biochemistry of seed oil biosynthesis, coupled with identification of genes for oilseed modification, have set the stage for the genetic engineering of oilseed crops that produce ‘designer’ plant seed oils tai...

One of the problems facing the introduction of novel crops is the concerns about their spread into the natural environment. A long-term study of oilseed rape (canola) growing on the verges of one of Britain’s busiest motorways provides some encouragement that at least some crops find the going tough outside the field environment in which they are sown. Michael Crawley at Imperial College London...