Crop improvement powered through plant breeding is critical for sustainable production of horticultural crops that contribute to healthful diets and enhance quality of life for people around the world. Currently there are too few breeders to satisfy global demands and opportunities in the public and private sectors of developing and developed countries. In order to meet future needs, it is impo...

The exclusivity conferred to inventors by intellectual property rights (IPRs) provide an ex ante incentive for innovation, but the resulting market power yields an ex post inefficiency (because it limits use of the innovation). Strong IPRs may also affect innovation by limiting access of proprietary knowledge in research aimed at new inventions and discoveries, which raises the question of whet...

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have increased our capacity for collecting finer spatiotemporal resolution data that were previously unobtainable through conventional methods. The use of UAS obtaining high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) in plant breeding programs has gained popularity recent years. integrity and quality the raw are essential ensuring accuracy predictive tools proper interpretation...

Successful management of plant diseases is mainly dependent on the accurate and efficient detection of plant pathogens, amount of genetic and pathogenic variability present in a pathogen population, development of disease resistant cultivars and deployment of effective resistance genes in different epidemiological regions. Beside conventional methods of pathogen detection and breeding resistant...

Straightbred and crossbred heifers (165) and cows (241) that were nonpregnant after exposure to fertile bulls for two consecutive breeding periods of 45 to 60 d (repeat breeders) and contemporary cows (102) that had produced a calf in the previous calving season (controls) were placed with bulls and were observed for mating. Repeat-breeder and control females were slaughtered at 2 to 51 d postm...

Alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs), where members of the same sex and population show distinct reproductive phenotypes governed by decision-rules, have been well-documented in males of many species, but are less well understood in females. The relative plasticity hypothesis (RPH) predicts that switches between plastic ARTs are mediated by changes in steroid hormones. This has received much...

Plant breeders have focused on improving plant architecture as an effective means to increase crop yield. Here, we identify the main-effect quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for plant shape-related traits in rice (Oryza sativa) and find candidate genes by applying whole genome re-sequencing of two parental cultivars using next-generation sequencing. To identify QTLs influencing plant shape, we ana...

In many cooperatively breeding societies, helping effort varies greatly among group members, raising the question of why dominant individuals tolerate lazy subordinates. In groups of carrion crows Corvus corone corone, helpers at the nest increase breeders' reproductive success, but chick provisioning is unevenly distributed among non-breeders, with a gradient that ranges from individuals that ...

The treefrog genus Boophis is one of the most species-rich endemic amphibian groups of Madagascar. It consists of species specialized to breeding in brooks (48 species) and ponds (10 species). We reconstructed the phylogeny of Boophis using 16S ribosomal DNA sequences (558 bp) from 27 species. Brook-breeders were monophyletic and probably derived from an ancestral pond-breeding lineage. Pond-br...

High planting density affects the morphology and productivity of many crop species. Our objectives were to examine the phenotypic and transcriptomic changes that occur during plant density stress in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) and maize (Zea mays L.) seedlings. In maize and barley seedlings, density stress impacted several morphological traits. Gene expression profi les were examined in four ba...