The outcome of species interactions is often difficult to predict, depending on the organisms involved and the ecological context. Nectar robbers remove nectar from flowers, often without providing pollination service, and their effects on plant reproduction vary in strength and direction. In two case studies and a meta-analysis, we tested the importance of pollen limitation and plant mating sy...

Plant regeneration is essential for maintaining forest biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, which are globally threatened by human disturbance. Here we present the first integrative meta-analysis on how forest disturbance affects multiple ecological processes of plant regeneration including pollination, seed dispersal, seed predation, recruitment and herbivory. We analysed 408 pairwise compa...

Janzen-Connell effects are negative effects on the survival of a plant's progeny at high conspecific densities or close to its conspecifics. Although the role of Janzen-Connell effects on the maintenance of plant diversity was frequently studied, only few studies targeted Janzen-Connell effects via postdispersal seed predation in temperate grassland systems. We examined effects of conspecific d...

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been reported to be involved in the development of maize plant. However, few focused on seed development of maize. Here, we identified 753 lncRNA candidates in maize genome from six seed samples. Similar to the mRNAs, lncRNAs showed tissue developmental stage specific and differential expression, indicating their putative role in seed development. Increasing ...

Conifers are an excellent group in which to explore how changing ecological interactions may have influenced the allocation of reproductive tissues in seed plants over long time scales, because of their extensive fossil record and their important role in terrestrial ecosystems since the Palaeozoic. Measurements of individual conifer pollen-producing and seed-producing cones from the Pennsylvani...

Putrescine in plant cells is formed either from Larginine by L-arginine decarboxylase (EC 4.11.19, ADC) or directly from L-ornithine by L-ornithine decarboxylase (EC 4.11.17, ODC) [1-5]. The contribution of ODC to the formation of polyamines in plants was claimed to be insignificant, since ODC activity in most plant tissues was found to be much lower than that of ADC [6]. The only welldocumente...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Alpine plants are considered one of the groups of species most sensitive to the direct and indirect threats to ecosystems caused by land use and climate change. Collecting and banking seeds of plant species is recognized as an effective tool for providing propagating material to re-establish wild plant populations and for habitat repair. However, seeds from cold wet environm...

Two venerable hypotheses, widely cited as explanations for either the success or failure of introduced species in recipient communities, are the natural enemies hypothesis and the biotic resistance hypothesis. The natural enemies hypothesis posits that introduced organisms spread rapidly because they are liberated from their co-evolved predators, pathogens and herbivores. The biotic resistance ...

Extracts from raw materials from different plant parts, tissue-cultured plants, and callus cultures of Oroxylum indicum were analyzed for in vitro antioxidant activities determined by DPPH radical scavenging assay and evaluated for phytochemical profiles by TLC and LC-MS methods. The results were analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA) to evaluate the similarity. Stalk, pedicel, flower, ...

Cumin (Cuminum cyminum L.) is one of the most important cultivable medicinal plants in Iran and today, it is the second most popular spice in the world after black pepper. It is essential to know the relationships between yield and its components in cumin breeding programs. Therefore, different multivariate statistical analysis was performed on plant characters in cumin to determine th...