The gaseous plant hormone ethylene regulates many aspects of plant growth, development and responses to the environment. Constitutive triple response 1 (CTR1) is a central regulator involved in the ethylene signal transduction pathway. To obtain a better understanding of this particular pathway in cucumber, the cDNA-encoding CTR1 (designated CsCTR1) was isolated from cucumber. A sequence alignm...

Cultivars used for wine and table grape have self-fertile hermaphrodite flowers whereas wild European vines and American and Asian species are dioecious, having either male or female flowers. Consistent with previous studies, the flower sex trait was mapped as a single major locus on chromosome 2 based on a pure Vitis vinifera population segregating for hermaphrodite and female progeny, and a h...

The flower of Hypericum calycinum, which appears uniformly yellow to humans, bears a UV pattern, presumably visible to insects. Two categories of pigments, flavonoids and dearomatized isoprenylated phloroglucinols (DIPs), are responsible for the UV demarcations of this flower. Flavonoids had been shown previously to function as floral UV pigments, but DIPs had not been demonstrated to serve in ...

Pollination regulates a syndrome of developmental responses that contributes to successful sexual reproduction in higher plants. Pollination-regulated developmental events collectively prepare the flower for fertilization and embryogenesis while bringing about the loss of floral organs that have completed their function in pollen dispersal and reception. Components of this process include chang...

Ongoing climatic changes have altered growing conditions for plants by limiting water availability and inducing unprecedented temperature increases, eliciting plant functional responses that compromise floral trait expression, reduce pollen production promote early self-pollination. In a controlled greenhouse study, of Collinsia heterophylla, an annual mixed-mated hermaphrodite, were grown unde...

Larger floral displays increase pollinator visitation as well as among-flower self-pollination (geitonogamy) in self-compatible species. Dichogamy (temporal separation of gender expression) can limit geitonogamy and increase outcrossing but this depends on pollinator behavior within inflorescences. Declining nectar volume from lower to upper flowers is a hypothesized adaptation to increase outc...

The identification of mutants in model plant species has led to the isolation of the floral homeotic function genes that play crucial roles in flower organ specification. However, floral homeotic C-function genes are rarely studied in basal eudicots. Here, we report the isolation and characterization of the AGAMOUS (AG) orthologous gene (PaAG) from a basal eudicot London plane tree (Platanus ac...

BACKGROUND Greenhouse workers are exposed to organic dusts, and they are thereby at risk of developing airway disorders. This study aims to measure personal endotoxin exposure, assess respiratory symptoms and measure fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) among female flower farm workers in Ethiopia. METHODS A cross-sectional study involving female workers (n = 248) from four flower farms was...

Sexual dimorphism is one of the most widespread and recognizable patterns of phenotypic variation in the biotic world. Sexual dimorphism in floral display is striking in the dioecious plant Silene latifolia, with males making many, small flowers compared to females. We investigated this dimorphism via artificial selection on two populations to determine whether genetic variation exists within p...

Flower image retrieval is a very important step for computer-aided plant species recognition. In this paper, we propose an efficient segmentation method based on color clustering and domain knowledge to extract flower regions from flower images. For flower retrieval, we use the color histogram of a flower region to characterize the color features of flower and two shape-based features sets, Cen...