Host plant choice is of vital importance for egg laying herbivorous insects that do not exhibit brood care. Several aspects, including palatability, nutritional quality and predation risk, have been found to modulate host preference. Olfactory cues are thought to enable host location. However, experimental data on odor features that allow choosing among alternative hosts while still in flight a...

Background. To cope with their natural enemies, plants rely on resistance and tolerance as defensive strategies. Evolution of these strategies among natural population can be constrained by the absence of genetic variation or because of the antagonistic genetic correlation (trade-off) between them. Also, since plant defenses are integrated by several traits, it has been suggested that trade-off...

A 60-year-old man had just enjoyed a summer meal that included hamburgers, fruit, and lettuce salad. He finished it off with some ice cream, and to make it healthier he threw on it a handful of seeds from the cupboard that he understood to be flax seeds. What he had eaten instead was a handful of Datura inoxia, or Moonflower seeds (Figure 1). Within 30 minutes he felt “drugged,” and shortly the...

For the determination of the hyoscyamine-scopolamine content in small quantities of fresh plant tissue an HPLC assay was developed; with a sensitivity of about 20 ng alkaloid per run. Analysis of the different organs of Datura innoxia plants are in accord with the concept that hyoscyamine is synthesized in the roots, whereas transformation to scopolamine starts in these organs and proceeds in t...

Pectin methylesterases (PME; EC 3.1.1.11) involved in de-esterification of pectin and have applicability in food, textiles, wines, pulp, and paper industries. In the present study, we compared PME activity of different parts of 3 Datura species and found that fruit coat showed maximum PME activity followed by leaf and seed. PME from leaves of D. stramonium (DsPME) was purified and characterized...