Environmental stresses are the most important factors that reduce plant growth in stages of development. The presence of aluminum in acidic soils as an environmental stress has an impact on different parts of the plant and reduces root growth, water absorption and nutrients and increases susceptibility to drought.  In order to evaluate the effect of aluminum stress levels on wheat at germinatio...

Trichoderma spp. are common rhizosphere inhabitants widely used as biological control agents and their role as plant growth promoting fungi has been established. Although soil pH influences several fungal and plant functional traits such as growth and nutrition, little is known about its influence in rhizospheric or mutualistic interactions. The role of pH in the Trichoderma-Arabidopsis interac...

Ethylene is one of the classical plant hormones with a diverse function in plant growth and development. Root elongation is sensitive to ethylene such that treatments with ethylene and the ethylene precursor 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid (ACC) inhibit root growth. MicroRNA as one type of endogenous, non-coding small RNAs, plays an important role in regulation of plant growth, developmen...

bermudagrass [cynodon dactylon (l.) pers.] is a perennial grass and has been long used as a medicinal herb in iranian traditional medicine to treat varied ailments. different parts of bermudagrass such as leaves, stolons, rhizomes and culms are rich sources of metabolites such as proteins, carbohydrates, mineral constituents, β-sitosterol, flavonoids, alkaloids, glycosides and triterpenoides. g...

A genetic analysis of root development in Arabidopsis thaliana has identified mutants that have abnormal morphogenesis. Four of these root morphogenesis mutants show dramatic alterations in post-embryonic root development. The short-root mutation results in a change from indeterminate to determinate root growth and the loss of internal root cell layers. The cobra and lion's tail mutations cause...

Plant organ phenotyping by non-invasive video imaging techniques provides a powerful tool to assess physiological traits and biomass production. We describe here a range of applications of a recently developed plant root monitoring platform (PlaRoM). PlaRoM consists of an imaging platform and a root extension profiling software application. This platform has been developed for multi parallel re...

Nitrate uptake by roots of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) was measured using (15)NO(3) (-), and the energy cost to the root was estimated by respirometry. Roots of 8-day-old cowpea seedlings respired 0.6 to 0.8 milligram CO(2) per plant per hour for growth and maintenance. Adding 10 millimolar NO(3) (-) to the root medium increased respiration by 20 to 30% during the following 6 hours. This increas...

P lant root hairs are experimental model systems for research on plant cell growth. The involvement of protons and reactive oxygen species (ROS) in root hair growth and development has been the subject of significant research effort (e.g., refs. 1–4). pH specifically has been implicated in the control of plant cell expansion (5), including that in root hair cells (6). ROS have recently come to ...