Stratospheric ozone depletion is expected to elevate the influx of ultraviolet-B radiation (UV-B) to the biosphere. Increased levels of UV-B may, in turn, alter important ecosystem processes such as decomposition. Previous studies have shown that growth under elevated UV-B can alter leaf quality in angiosperm species and thereby indirectly change subsequent rates of leaf decay. In this experime...

Potential involvement of seed storage proteins in susceptibility to aflatoxin contamination was assessed with in vitro tests. Initially, two oilseed storage proteins [cottonseed storage protein (CSP) and zein] were compared with bovine serum albumin (BSA) and collagen. Supplementation of a complete defined medium with either oilseed storage protein resulted in significantly more aflatoxin produ...

Recently, various linear source models, for example, 103Pd RadioCoil, have been introduced to overcome the shortcomings of traditional "seed" type interstitial prostate brachytherapy implants, such as migration and clumping of the seeds. However, the existing prostate treatment-planning systems have not been updated to perform dose calculation for implants with linear sources greater than 1.0 c...

to evaluate the effect of nitrogen fertilizer amounts on grain yield of forage corn in 2012, a pilot was implemented in islamic azad university agricultural research station, isfahan, as a split plot in a randomized complete block design. main plots consisted of four levels: control (no fertilization ) , 50 , 100 and 150 kg per ha nitrogen from urea source and subplots , including several varie...

this study aimed to investigate the effect of animal grazing on soil seed bank characteristics in the northern slopes of alborz. for this purpose, soil seed bank characteristics were compared between grazed and ungrazed areas. therefore, four transects perpendicular to the sides of exclosure inside and outside of it were established. then soil samples were collected within 28 plots inside and 2...

The role of seed infection with Ascochyta pisi using naturally infected seeds with an incidence from 0.5 to 14.5% was studied in field pea experiments in western Canada at locations with historically low inoculum pressure. A significant effect of A. pisi seed infection on the emergence of seedlings was observed in one experiment and when all data were pooled, but emergence was only reduced mini...

Seed germination patterns were studied in E. purpurea (L.) Moench grouped by seed source, one group of seven lots from commercially cultivated populations and a second group of nine lots regenerated from ex situ conserved wild populations. Germination tests were conducted in a growth chamber in light (40 μmol·m(-2)·s(-1)) or darkness at 25 °C for 20 days after soaking the seeds in water for 10 ...

Diseases caused by Alternaria sp. are among the most common diseases of crops throughout the world. Alternaria sp. is a common component of the flora of wheat seed. Although isolation of Alternaria sp. from wheat (Triticum aestivum) seed has been reported in Argentina, development of the Alternaria blight in plants from infected seeds has not been demonstrated experimentally. Seed transmission ...

Plant recruitment in nature exhibits several distinctive patterns ranging from hump shaped to monotonically decreasing with distance from the seed source. We investigate the role of postdispersal seed predation in shaping these patterns, introducing a new mechanistic model that explicitly accounts for the movement strategy used by seed eaters. The model consists of two partial differential equa...

This paper presents a paraphrase acquisition method that uncovers and exploits generalities underlying paraphrases: paraphrase patterns are first induced and then used to collect novel instances. Unlike existing methods, ours uses both bilingual parallel and monolingual corpora. While the former are regarded as a source of high-quality seed paraphrases, the latter are searched for paraphrases t...