AFTER centuries of improving crop plants by breeding for desirable traits, agricultural scientists are now using the tools of molecular biology and genetic engineering to develop transgenic plants with the desired genes. Enormous progress has been made over the past decade in our understanding of the highly complex molecular events that occur in plant–pathogen interactions. This knowledge in tu...

Most agronomic models estimate canopy light interception using the Beer-Lambert law. This method only accounts for leaf area index (LAI) and leaf angle distribution (LAD) without considering the crop’s structural heterogeneity in space, or soil-leaf or leaf-leaf radiative scattering. These factors have been extensively studied during the past ten years e.g; (Luquet et al. 1998; Nouvellon et al....

Large-scale farming of agricultural crops requires on-time detection of diseases for pest management. Hyperspectral remote sensing data taken from low-altitude flights usually have high spectral and spatial resolutions, which can be very useful in detecting stress in green vegetation. In this study, we used late blight in tomatoes to illustrate the capability of applying hyperspectral remote se...

The domestication of new crops would promote agricultural diversity and could provide a solution to many of the problems associated with intensive agriculture. We suggest here that genome editing can be used as a new tool by breeders to accelerate the domestication of semi-domesticated or even wild plants, building a more varied foundation for the sustainable provision of food and fodder in the...

The majority of terrestrial plants live in association with symbiotic fungi that facilitate mineral nutrient uptake. The oldest and most prevalent of these associations are the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbioses that first evolved approximately 400 million years ago, coinciding with the appearance of the first land plants. Crop domestication, in comparison, is a relatively recent event, begi...

Transgenic oilseed rape (Brassica napus) plants may remain as 'volunteer' weeds in following crops, complicating cultivation and contaminating crop yield. Volunteers can become feral as well as act as a genetic bridge for the transfer of transgenes to weedy relatives. Transgenic mitigation using genes that are positive or neutral to the crop, but deleterious to weeds, should prevent volunteer e...

ABSTRACT Xanthomonas campestris pv. campestris (X. campestris) infects a large number of cruciferous plants, including weeds. California has one of the largest and most diverse populations of wild cruciferous plants in the world. Although considerable information is available on the genetic diversity of X. campestris in commercial crop plants, nothing is known about the diversity in strains inf...

Bacteria are able to communicate with each other and sense their environment in a population density dependent mechanism known as quorum sensing (QS). N-acyl-homoserine lactones (AHLs) are the QS signaling compounds of Gram-negative bacteria which are frequent colonizers of rhizospheres. While cross-kingdom signaling and AHL-dependent gene expression in plants has been confirmed, the responses ...

in the absence of herbicides, cover crops play an important role for weed management in organic than in conventional farming. therefore, in order to evaluate the effects of cover crop management and plant density of buckwheat (fagopyrum esculentum) as cover crop on weed suppression, a field experiment was conducted at the research farm of university of zanjan, during the growing season of 2011....

Recent studies indicate that rice fields contribute to the conservation of aquatic plants, however, repeated cultivation can reduce the species diversity harbored by rice fields. Repeated tillage, agrochemical application and environmental homogeneity can reduce plant diversity and select for species more tolerant to disturbance. Our hypotheses were: 1) macrophyte richness and biomass decrease ...