Introduction: The brown planthopper (BPH), Nilaparvata lugens (Stål) (Hemiptera: Delphacidae), is a notorious insect pest of rice. Nutrient supplementation can alter plant biochemical compositions which may indirectly affect on ecological fitness parameters of its insect pest. However, few findings are available on nutrient-induced ecological fitness of BPH and relationship of BPH fitness param...

Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) is a powerful tool for physical mapping in human and other mammalian species. However, application of the FISH technique has been limited in plant species, especially for mapping single- or low-copy DNA sequences, due to inconsistent signal production in plant chromosome preparations. Here we demonstrate that bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones...

WRKY proteins, which belong to a large family of plant-specific transcription factors, play important roles in plant defenses against pathogens and herbivores by regulating defense-related signaling pathways. Recently, a rice WRKY transcription factor OsWRKY53 has been reported to function as a negative feedback modulator of OsMPK3/OsMPK6 and thereby to control the size of the investment a rice...

BACKGROUND In the recent years, cases of elderly women suffering from metabolic diseases such as dyslipidemias brought about by hormonal imbalance after menopause are continuously increasing. In this regard, a continuous and escalating demand to develop a more functional and highly nutritional food product as an adjunct supplement that can help alleviate these diseases is still being sought. ...

Growing dogs were divided into three groups and were fed on nutritionally-balanced diets. Control dogs were fed on a rice diet, the cassava (gari) group ate a diet in which gari provided the carbohydrate source, while the rice +cyanide group consumed the rice diet to which hydrocyanic acid (equivalent to that present in gari) was added. Each group consumed its diet for 14 weeks, during which pl...

Although several cases of severe hypoalbuminemia resulting from rice milk have been described in the past, today the use of rice milk without nutritional counseling to treat eczema is still a continuing, poor practice. We describe a kwashiorkor case in an infant with severe eczema exclusively fed with rice milk. It is well documented that rice milk is not a sufficient protein source. Moreover, ...

A rice tiller is a specialized grain-bearing branch that contributes greatly to grain yield. The MONOCULM 1 (MOC1) gene is the first identified key regulator controlling rice tiller number; however, the underlying mechanism remains to be elucidated. Here we report a novel rice gene, Tillering and Dwarf 1 (TAD1), which encodes a co-activator of the anaphase-promoting complex (APC/C), a multi-sub...

Plant colonization by bradyrhizobia is found not only in leguminous plants but also in nonleguminous species such as rice. To understand the evolution of the endophytic symbiosis of bradyrhizobia, the effect of the ecosystems of rice plantations on their associations was investigated. Samples were collected from various rice (Oryza sativa) tissues and crop rotational systems. The rice endophyti...

The comparative effects of instant cooked rice made from giant embryo mutant or ordinary normal rice on body weight and lipid profile in high fat-fed mice were investigated. The animals were given experimental diets for seven weeks: normal control (NC), high fat (HF), and HF supplemented with instant normal white (HF-NW), normal brown (HF-NB), giant embryonic white (HF-GW), or giant embryonic b...

Rice improvement breeding is one of the most important research fields in China. With the development of modern rice breeding technology, hundreds to thousands of new varieties are produced daily, creating the impetus for rapid plant phenotyping evaluation. However, traditional measurement is inefficiency, contact-interferential, and lack-objectivity. Thus a high-throughput and automatic extrac...