As a resource allocation strategy, plant growth and defense responses are generally mutually antagonistic. Brassinosteroid (BR) regulates many aspects of plant development and stress responses, however, genetic evidence of its integrated effects on plant growth and stress tolerance is lacking. We overexpressed the Arabidopsis BR biosynthetic gene AtDWF4 in the oilseed plant Brassica napus and s...

The ability to rapidly and safely silence the electrical activity of individual neurons or neuron populations is invaluable in the study of brain circuit mapping. The expression of light-driven ion channels and pumps allows these pathways to be observed, mapped and controlled with millisecond timescale resolution. We here show that it is possible to mediate the powerful multiple-color silencing...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The hypothesis was tested that pectin content and methylation degree participate in regulation of cell wall mechanical properties and in this way may affect tissue growth and freezing resistance over the course of plant cold acclimation and de-acclimation. METHODS Experiments were carried on the leaves of two double-haploid lines of winter oil-seed rape (Brassica napus sub...

The LmR1 locus, which controls seedling resistance to the blackleg fungus Leptosphaeria maculans in the Brassica napus cultivar Shiralee, was positioned on linkage group N7. Fine genetic mapping in a population of 2500 backcross lines identified three molecular markers that cosegregated with LmR1. Additional linkage mapping in a second population colocalized a seedling resistance gene, ClmR1, f...

Brassica napus is an economically important crop across different continents including temperate and subtropical regions in Europe, Canada, South Asia, China and Australia. Its widespread cultivation also brings setbacks as it plays host to fungal, oomycete and chytrid pathogens that can lead to serious yield loss. For sustainable crop production, identification of resistance (R) genes in B. na...