Podostemaceae (the river weeds) are ecologically and morphologically unusual angiosperms. The subfamily Tristichoideae has typical shoot apical meristems (SAMs) that produce leaves, but Podostemoideae is devoid of SAMs and new leaves arise below the base of older leaves. To reveal the genetic basis for the evolution of novel shoot organogenesis in Podostemaceae, we examined the expression patte...

Leaves are most vulnerable to herbivory during expansion. We hypothesised that one factor favouring small leaves could be that smaller-leaved species have shorter expansion times and are therefore exposed to high levels of herbivory for a shorter period than large leaves. In order to test this hypothesis, leaf expansion time and leaf area loss were measured for 51 species from Sydney, Australia...

Variation in the size, shape, and positioning of leaves as the major photosynthetic organs strongly impacts crop yield, and optimizing these aspects is a central aim of cereal breeding [1, 2]. Leaf growth in grasses is driven by cell proliferation and cell expansion in a basal growth zone [3]. Although several factors influencing final leaf size and shape have been identified from rice and maiz...

Freezing of barley (Hordeum vulgare), Hordeum murinum, and Holcus lanatus was studied using infrared video thermography. In the field, ice could enter H. lanatus leaves through hydathodes. In laboratory tests with barley, initially 0.4% of the leaf water froze, spreading in alternate strips of high and low freezing intensity longitudinally at 1 to 4 cm s(-1), and simultaneously spreading latera...

Rice is a staple food for at least 50% of the world’s population. Therefore, it is one of the most important crop plants on Earth (Lucca et al., 2002). However, milled rice is a poor source of essential micronutrients such as Fe and Zn (Bouis and Welch, 2010), whose deficiencies affect over three billion people worldwide, mostly in developing countries (Welch and Graham, 2004). Fe and Zn malnut...

In this experiment the effect of inoculation with Azospirillum on the flag leaf and spike rachis anatomical features and also on grain yield and grain weight was investigated for the first time in bread and durum wheats during 2015-2016 growing season under semi-arid condition. The crop yield increased due to the inoculation with Azospirillum with a maximum yield increase of about 8.0 per cent ...

Net photosynthesis, dark respiration, chlorophyll and carbohydrate content, and leaf and shoot growth of deciduous peach [Prunus persica (L.) Batsch] saplings, grown in greenhouse conditions, were measured to assess changes in carbon balance during leaf development. The 6th, 12th, and 16th leaf node were measured from the first flush at the base through expansion to maturity (the first node bei...

Global food security is being severely affected by the rapid increase in population and drastic climate change. Drought stress most important limiting factor for sustainable production of several crops, including wheat. The gradual temperature rise reduced precipitations are likely to cause frequent onset droughts around world. Therefore, alleviation drought crop plants has become an essential ...

Cellular proteins are extensively degraded during leaf senescence, and this correlates with an up-regulation of protease gene expression, particularly cysteine proteases. The objectives of this work were (i) to detect cysteine proteases associated with senescence of wheat leaves under different conditions and (ii) to find out their subcellular location. Activity labelling of cysteine proteases ...

Rice is the staple food of half of the world's population; however, it is a poor source of essential micronutrients such as Fe and Zn. Since flag leaves are one of the sources of remobilized metals for developing seeds, the identification of the molecular players that might contribute to the process of metal transport from flag leaves to the seeds may be useful for biofortification purposes. We...