Root-knot nematodes (Meloidogynespp.) are the most important pests of vegetables, field crops, and ornamental plants. During our previous study, twenty eight okra cultivars were examined against resistance and Pusa Swami was ranked the most susceptible. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of increasing initial population density (Pi) of M. incognita on nematode reproduction...

Photosynthesis occurs in mesophyll cells of specialized organs such as leaves. The rigid cell wall encapsulating photosynthetic cells controls the expansion and distribution of cells within photosynthetic tissues. The relationship between photosynthesis and plant growth is affected by leaf area. However, the underlying genetic mechanisms affecting carbon partitioning to different aspects of lea...

Serving as an important second messenger, calcium ion has unique properties and universal ability to transmit diverse signals that trigger primary physiological actions in cells in response to hormones, pathogens, light, gravity, and stress factors. Being a second messenger of paramount significance, calcium is required at almost all stages of plant growth and development, playing a fundamental...

Traditional quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models aim to capture global structure-activity trends present in a data set. In many situations, there may be groups of molecules which exhibit a specific set of features which relate to their activity or inactivity. Such a group of features can be said to represent a local structure-activity relationship. Traditional QSAR models ...

Plant nitrogen (N) relationship has the potential to regulate plant and ecosystem responses strongly to global warming but has not been carefully examined under warmed environments. This study was conducted to examine responses of plant N relationship (i.e. leaf N concentration, N use efficiency, and plant N content in this study) to a 4-year experimental warming in a tallgrass prairie in the c...

The biodiversity-productivity relationship is still under debate for alpine grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau. We know little about direct and indirect effects of biotic and abiotic drivers on this relationship, especially in regard to plant functional trait diversity. Here, we examine how aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) and precipitation use efficiency (PUE) respond to climate, soi...

Although host-plant selection is a central topic in ecology, its general underpinnings are poorly understood. Here, we performed a case study focusing on the publicly available data on Japanese butterflies. A combined statistical analysis of plant-herbivore relationships and taxonomy revealed that some butterfly subfamilies in different families feed on the same plant families, and the occurren...

Although plant adaptation to serpentine soils has been studied for several decades, the mechanisms of plant adaptation to edaphic extremes are still poorly understood. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are common root symbionts that can increase the plant hosts' establishment and growth in stressful environments. However, little is known about the role plant-AMF interactions play in plant adap...

Among the multitude of learning algorithms that can be employed for deriving quantitative structure-activity relationships, regression trees have the advantage of being able to handle large data sets, dynamically perform the key feature selection, and yield readily interpretable models. A conventional method of building a regression tree model is recursive partitioning, a fast greedy algorithm ...