Sexual reproduction in higher plants uses pollination, involving interactions between pollen and pistil. Self-incompatibility (SI) prevents self-fertilization, providing an important mechanism to promote outbreeding. SI is controlled by the S-locus; discrimination occurs between incompatible pollen, which is rejected, while compatible pollen can achieve fertilization. In Papaver rhoeas, S prote...

Locally grown, wild food plants seasonally contribute a considerable portion of the daily diet in certain Mediterranean areas and it has been suggested that the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet on human health partly originate from the antioxidant effect of flavonoid-rich food plants. The nutrient content of most wild plants is higher than that of cultivated ones and may vary depend...

31 Plant species differ in their ability to transform available recourses to biomass and to respond 32 in a plastic way to environmental circumstances; we hypothesized that such differences 33 among four weed taxa of Papaver would explain differences in their competitive response. 34 We first compared two populations each of Papaver rhoeas L., P. dubium L. ssp. dubium, P. 35 dubium L. ssp. leco...

Programmed cell death (PCD) is an important and universal process regulating precise death of unwanted cells in eukaryotes. In plants, the existence of PCD has been firmly established for about a decade, and many components shown to be involved in apoptosis/PCD in mammalian systems are found in plant cells undergoing PCD. Here, we review work from our lab demonstrating the involvement of PCD in...