In the arms race between plants, herbivores, and their natural enemies, specialized herbivores may use plant defenses for their own benefit, and variation in plant traits may affect the benefits that herbivores derive from these defenses. Pieris brassicae is a specialist herbivore of plants containing glucosinolates, a specific class of defensive secondary metabolites. Caterpillars of P. brassi...

Introduction Intake of broccoli sprouts, a rich source of the glucosinolate glucoraphanin, has been associated with decreased incidence, multiplicity, and tumor growth in animal cancer models.1-3 In 1992, Paul Talalay, MD, and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University identified the isothiocyanate, sulforaphane, a biologically active metabolite of glucoraphanin, as the compound in broccoli respons...

this study examines the assumption that plant resistance to herbivory has fitness costs. to assess costs, i used the standard method of determining whether there is a significant negative genetic correlation between the resistance character and damage in the presence of herbivory and with fitness in the absence of herbivory. seeds of five plants from four genotypes of arabidopsis thaliana were ...

A micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography (MECC) method has been developed for monitoring the myrosinase catalysed hydrolysis of 2-hydroxy substituted glucosinolates and the simultaneous formation of the corresponding degradation products (oxazolidine-2-thiones (OZTs) and nitriles). Glucosibarin ((2R)-2-hydroxy-2-phenylethylglucosinolate) was chosen as the model glucosinolate owing to ...

Brassica juncea seedlings contained a twofold higher glucosinolate content than B. rapa and these secondary sulfur compounds accounted for up to 30% of the organic sulfur fraction. The glucosinolate content was not affected by H2S and SO2 exposure, demonstrating that these sulfur compounds did not form a sink for excessive atmospheric supplied sulfur. Upon sulfate deprivation, the foliarly abso...

Glucosinolates are a diverse class of S- and N-containing secondary metabolites that play a variety of roles in plant defense. In this study, we used Arabidopsis thaliana mutants that contain different amounts of glucosinolates and glucosinolate-breakdown products to study the effects of these phytochemicals on phytopathogenic fungi. We compared the fungus Botrytis cinerea, which infects a vari...

Total aliphatic and indole glucosinolates, phenolic compounds (flavonoids and hydroxycinnamoyl derivatives), and vitamin C contents were evaluated in freshly harvested broccoli (Brassica oleracea L., var. italica, cv. Marathon) inflorescences. These were film-wrapped and stored for 7 days at 1 degrees C to simulate a maximum period of commercial transport and distribution. After cold storage, i...