Drought stress induced pollen sterility is a detrimental factor reducing grain number in wheat. Exploring the mechanisms underlying pollen fertility under drought conditions could assist breeding high-yielding wheat cultivars with stress tolerance. Here, by using two Chinese wheat cultivars subjected to different levels of polyethylene glycol (PEG)-induced drought stress, possible links between...

Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) assay was performed to estimate genetic polymorphism in six different rice (Oryza sativa L.) cultivars viz. Basmati 370, DM 25, IRATOM 24, Binadhan 6, TNDB 100 and Y 1281. Three out of the 15 decamer random primers showed amplification of genomic DNA in 24 individuals. The primers produced a total of 26 bands of which 14 were polymorphic. Proportion of po...

Nematode management decisions should be based, in part, on knowledge of the damage threshold population density, and this value is likely to vary based on the level of resistance of the cotton cultivar. The damage functions of two cotton cultivars resistant to the root-knot nematode (Meloidogyne incognita) were compared with that of a susceptible cultivar in field microplots using a 3 x 7 facto...

Ethylene has long been considered the key regulator of ripening in climacteric fruit. Recent evidence showed that auxin also plays an important role during fruit ripening, but the nature of the interaction between the two hormones has remained unclear. To understand the differences in ethylene- and auxin-related behaviours that might reveal how the two hormones interact, we compared two plum (P...

Effects of yard waste compost and maize (Zea mays) cultivar on population densities of plant-parasitic nematodes were examined in four experiments in north Florida. In one experiment, eight maize cultivars were evaluated; the other three experiments involved split-plot designs with compost treatments as main plots and maize cultivars as subplots. The three compost treatments used in these exper...

Drought is the major yield-limiting abiotic factor of tea cultivation. In the present study, influence of drought stress on cellular ultrastructure and antioxidants was studied drought-tolerant (TV-23) and -sensitive (S.3/A3) tea cultivars by imposing drought stress for 21 days. Drought stress led to considerable structural alterations in mitochondria, chloroplast and vacuole. Lesser membrane i...

Phenotypic uniformity of carrot androgenic lines of R1 generations was assessed in respect to several morphological traits in vegetative and generative stages. Seeds of R1 populations were obtained by self pollination of R0 androgenic plants derived by the use of anther culture technique from three donor cultivars: ‘HCM’, ‘CxC9900 F1’ and ‘Narbonne F1’. R1 plants of donor cultivar ‘HCM’ were ob...

Plant variety and cultivar identification is one of the most important aspects in agricultural systems. The large number of varieties or landraces among crop plants has made it difficult to identify and characterize varieties solely on the basis of morphological characters because they are non stable and originate due to environmental and climatic conditions, and therefore phenotypic plasticity...

The comparative responses of two broccoli cultivars (Brassica oleracea var. Italica, cv. Parthenon and cv. Naxos) to a 15 d exposure to different NaCl levels were investigated. Salinity led to increased concentrations of Na(+) and Cl(-) ions in both cultivars, a disruption of the endogenous minerals levels in the shoots and roots-that varied with the cultivar and salt concentration-and decrease...

A major restriction on sand pear (Pyrus pyrifolia) production is black spot disease caused by the necrotrophic fungus Alternaria alternata. However, the pear response mechanism to A. alternata is unknown at the molecular level. Here, host responses of a resistant cultivar Cuiguan (CG) and a susceptible cultivar Sucui1 (SC1) to A. alternata infection were investigated. We found that the primary ...