The seed coat is important for embryo protection, seed hydration, and dispersal. Seed coat composition is also of interest to the agricultural sector, since it impacts the nutritional value for humans and livestock alike. Although some seed coat genes have been identified, the developmental pathways controlling seed coat development are not completely elucidated, and a global genetic program as...

Smallholders in Asia and Africa require low-cost seed drills for minimal soil disturbance while establishing various crops. A seed drill that can be drawn by the widely-available two-wheel tractor (2WT) is an attractive option for mechanization of no-till in small-sized fields. The Versatile Strip Seed Drill (VSSD) was designed with the capacity to make up to 40 mm wide and 60 mm deep strips in...

Intra- and interspecific spatially contagious seed dispersal has far-reaching implications for plant recruitment, distribution, and community assemblage. However, logistical and analytical limitations have curtailed our understanding concerning the mechanisms and resulting spatial patterns of contagious seed dispersal in most systems and, especially, in complex seed-disperser networks. We inves...

Weed seeds may maintain their viability when passing through the digestive tract of cattle and can be therefore dispersed by animal movement or the application of manure. Whether different cattle types of the same species can cause differential weed seed fate is largely unknown to us particularly under non-grazed systems similar to Holstein-Friesian dairy farming. We investigated the effect on ...

In coming decades, increasing temperatures are expected to impact crop yield and seed quality. To develop low input systems, the effects of temperature and sulfur (S) nutrition in oilseed rape, a high S demanding crop, need to be jointly considered. In this study, we investigated the effects of temperatures [High Temperature (HT), 33°C/day, 19°C/night vs. Control Temperature (Ctrl T), 20°C/day,...

Hypothesis: Sex allocation theory predicts that the pollen–ovule ratio should increase linearly with increasing seed size among seed plants (Charnov, 1982). Data examined: We retrieved data for the pollen–ovule ratio, seed size, and possible confounding variables (ovule number, plant height, mating system) from a database and additional literature for 299 gymnosperm plant species of the German ...

Hypothesis: Sex allocation theory predicts that the pollen-ovule ratio should increase linearly with increasing seed size among seed plants (Charnov 1982). Data examined: We retrieved data for pollen-ovule ratio, seed size and possible confounding variables (ovule number, plant height, mating system) from a database and additional literature for 299 angyosperm plant species of the German flora....

Seed banking is now widely used for the ex situ conservation of wild plant species. Many seed banks that conserve wild species broadly follow international genebank guidelines for seed collection, processing, storage, and management. However, over the last 10-20 years, problems and knowledge gaps have been identified, which have led to more focused seed conservation research on diverse species....

Animals and fruiting plants are involved in a complex set of interactions, with animals relying on fruiting trees as food resources, and fruiting trees relying on animals for seed dispersal. This interdependence shapes fruit signals such as colour and odour, to increase fruit detectability, and animal sensory systems, such as colour vision and olfaction to facilitate food identification and sel...