In the USA, cultivated sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is often sympatric with wild H. annuus, which is an agricultural weed that grows along roadsides and in other disturbed sites. We found that crop-to-wild gene flow was common (~5-40% hybrids) when wild plants occurred within <1,000 m of the crop, and crop-specific genetic markers persisted in wild populations for many generations. Crop-to-wil...

Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) oil remains under-utilised albeit one of the major seed oils produced world-wide. Moreover, the high oleic sunflower varieties make the oil attractive for applications requiring high temperature processes and those targeting the C=C double bond functionality. Herein an overview of the recent developments in olefin metathesis of sunflower-based feedstocks is pres...

Lentz et al. (1) cite linguistic evidence supporting their hypothesis that Helianthus annuus was domesticated in Mesoamerica in pre-Columbian times. This consists, in part, of a list of names for sunflower collected from speakers of 14 contemporary native languages. They conclude that the fact that terms for sunflower in 11 of these languages do not phonologically resemble Spanish words for sun...

Genetic analyses of the domestication syndrome have revealed that domestication-related traits typically have a very similar genetic architecture across most crops, being conditioned by a small number of quantitative trait loci (QTL), each with a relatively large effect on the phenotype. To date, the domestication of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) stands as the only counterexample to this pat...

OBJECTIVE This study was to evaluate the sunflower cake and enzymatic complex fed to broilers from 22 to 42 d of age. METHODS In a completely randomized design, a total of 850 birds were allotted in a 2×5 factorial scheme (with and without enzymatic complex) and five inclusion levels (0%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%) of sunflower cake. There were 5 replications and 17 birds in each experimental unit. D...

The biology and behavior of the longhorned beetle Dectes texanus LeConte (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) was studied on two host plants that suffer economic losses from this pest; sunflower, Helianthus annuus, and soybean, Glycines max. Reciprocal crosses of D. texanus collected from the two plants all produced viable progeny, indicating that conspecific insects attack both crops. Pupae from soybean...

Sunflower is an important oilseed crop, however the genetic transformation of sunflower has been very challenging to date. In the present study, we describe a successful Agrobacterium-mediated transformation approach via somatic embryogenesis from immature zygotic embryos of sunflower. By optimizing the culture medium, we have achieved high efficiency (45.5%) of somatic embryogenesis with MS me...