The phase transition from vegetative to reproductive growth is a critical event in the life cycle of flowering plants. FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) plays a central role in the regulation of this transition by integrating signals from multiple flowering pathways in the leaves and transmitting them to the shoot apical meristem. In this study, we characterized FT homologs in the temperate grasses Brachy...

This work presents an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) system to evaluate, and potentially treat, the alterations in rhythmic hand movements seen in Parkinson's disease (PD) and the elderly (EC), by comparison with healthy young controls (YC). The system integrates the subjects into a VR environment by means of a Head Mounted Display, such that subjects perceive themselves in a virtual world cons...

The Arabidopsis flowering locus T (FT) gene encodes the mobile florigen essential for floral induction. While movement of the FT protein has been shown to occur within plants, systemic spread of FT mRNA remains to be unequivocally demonstrated. Utilizing novel RNA mobility assay vectors based on two distinct movement-defective viruses, Potato virus X and Turnip crinkle virus, and an agroinfiltr...

BACKGROUND The ability to induce flowering on demand is of significant biotechnological interest. FT protein has been recently identified as an important component of the mobile flowering hormone, florigen, whose function is conserved across the plant kingdom. We therefore focused on manipulation of both endogenous and heterologous FT genes to develop a floral induction system where flowering w...

Fair Trade (FT) markets have been introduced as a mechanism to improve the economic livelihoods of smallholder farmers by translating consumers’ “ethical demand” into higher prices for producers. Unlike other certification mechanisms such as organic, dolphin-friendly, and shade grown that intend on affecting the production process, FT explicitly seeks to deliver rents to producers via the price...

Introduction During the summer and fall of 1997, the Hoop Research Complex was developed at the Iowa State University (ISU) Rhodes Research Farm for comparing hoop structures to confinement for swine finishing. The site consists of three hoop structures and one modular confinement building. The hoops, each 30 ft × 60 ft, are oriented north/south. The south end of each hoop has a concrete floor ...

FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) plays a key role as a mobile floral induction signal that initiates the floral transition. Therefore, precise control of FT expression is critical for the reproductive success of flowering plants. Coexistence of bivalent histone H3 lysine 27 trimethylation (H3K27me3) and H3K4me3 marks at the FT locus and the role of H3K27me3 as a strong FT repression mechanism in Arabidop...

We introduce a constraint system called FT. This system offers a theoretical and practical alternative to the usual Herbrand system of constraints over constructor trees. Like Herbrand, FT provides a universal data structure based on trees. However, the trees of FT (called feature trees) are more general than the constructor trees of Herbrand, and the constraints of FT are of finer grain and of...

BACKGROUND The structural changes in filum terminale (FT) may be responsible for tethered cord syndrome (TCS) in children. Although the histological changes in FT related to TCS are well-known, there is no comparative study of the changes which occur in TCS and normal fetal FT samples. The aims of this study are to compare the histological changes which occurred in FT samples of TCS and in fetu...

In Arabidopsis thaliana, the genes FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) and TERMINAL FLOWER1 (TFL1) have antagonistic roles in regulating the onset of flowering: FT activates and TFL1 represses flowering. Both encode small, closely related transcription cofactors of ∼175 amino acids. Previous studies identified a potential ligand binding residue as well as a divergent external loop as critical for the differ...