Root water uptake by ricinus communis (castor bean) in fine sand was investigated using MRI with multiecho sampling. Before starting the experiments the plants germinated and grew for 3 weeks in a cylindrical container with a diameter of 9 cm. Immediately before the MRI experiments started, the containers were water-saturated and sealed, so water content changes were only caused by root water u...

Water, salinity and nitrogen are the major factors affecting maize production in arid and semi-arid areas. The objectives of this study were to investigate the effects of different water, salinity and nitrogen levels on yield-water relationships, water use, water productivity (WP), water use efficiency (WUE) and water uptake reduction function by maize hybrid SC-704 in a semi-arid area and ...

An oxidative gating of water channels (aquaporins: AQPs) was observed in roots of corn seedlings as already found for the green alga Chara corallina. In the presence of 35 mM hydrogen peroxide (H2O2)--a precursor of hydroxyl radicals (*OH)--half times of water flow (as measured with the aid of pressure probes) increased at the level of both entire roots and individual cortical cells by factors ...

Root hairs are single tubular cells formed from the differentiation of epidermal cells on roots. They are involved in water and nutrient uptake and represent the infection site on leguminous roots by rhizobia, soil bacteria that establish a nitrogen-fixing symbiosis. Root hairs develop by polar cell expansion or tip growth, a unique mode of plant growth shared only with pollen tubes. A more com...

background: phytoremediation is one of the methods used to remove contaminants and while being simple, cheap and efficient, does not cause environmental deterioration. the aims of this study were phytoremediation of soil contaminated by cd, the simultaneous survey of the influence of different electrical conductivity values, and comparison of two soil amendments including sludge and municipal c...

Aquaporins are ubiquitous channel proteins that facilitate the transport of water across cell membranes. Aquaporins show a typically high isoform multiplicity in plants, with 35 homologs in Arabidopsis. The integrated function of plant aquaporins and the function of each individual isoform remain poorly understood. Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight analyses suggested th...

Different spatial distributions of soil moisture were imposed on field-grown grapevines by applying the same irrigation volumes to the entire (DI; deficit irrigation) or part of the (PRD; partial root zone drying) root zone. Five treatments were applied: controls irrigated at 60% ETc (crop evapotranspiration) for the whole season (308 mm year(-1)); DI-1 and PRD-1 that received the same irrigati...

An improved genetic algorithm was applied and examined to optimize the weights of a neural network model for estimating root length density (RLD) distributions of winter wheat under salinity stress. Thereafter, soil water and solute transport with root-water-uptake in a soil-wheat system were simulated numerically, in which the estimated RLD distributions were incorporated. The results showed t...

Chickpea is mostly grown on stored soil moisture, and deep/profuse rooting has been hypothesized for almost three decades to be critical for improving chickpea tolerance to terminal drought. However, temporal patterns of water use that leave water available for reproduction and grain filling could be equally critical. Therefore, variation in water use pattern and root depth/density were measure...