In many parts of the developed world, the sale and use of phosphide is under strict regulations with adequate training of workers being a major perquisite before its use. In Nigeria this chemical is commonly available and in most cases users are largely untrained, therefore contamination of cowpea with residual phosphide post-fumigation does occur. The aim of this study is to determine the impa...

Cowpea is an important tropical crop. It provides a large proportion of the food resource for the African human population and their livestock. The yield and quality of cowpea have been dramatically improved through traditional breeding strategies for the past few decades. However, reports of heritability estimates for early growth of cowpea are rare. We designed a simple experiment to estimate...

• Research into the adoption of improved legume varieties provides evidence that farmers are now growing these in many developing countries and regions. • There has been large-scale adoption of improved chickpea varieties in southern India and small-scale adoption in the Horn of Africa. Specifically, there has been a shift in cultivated area from north to south/central India that is attributed ...

Cowpea is an important grain legume crop of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Leaf curl and golden mosaic diseases caused by Mungbean yellow mosaic India virus (MYMIV) have emerged as most devastating viral diseases of cowpea in Southeast Asia. In this study, we employed RNA interference (RNAi) strategy to control cowpea-infecting MYMIV. For this, we generated transgenic cowpea plants ...

Cowpea (V. unguiculata L. Walp) is a climate resilient legume crop important for food security. Cultivated cowpea (V. unguiculata L) generally comprises the bushy, short-podded grain cowpea dominant in Africa and the climbing, long-podded vegetable cowpea popular in Asia. How selection has contributed to the diversification of the two types of cowpea remains largely unknown. In the current stud...

Previous genetic studies in cowpea [Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp] have shown that an active bipartite transposable element (TE) is responsible for a range of mutant phenotypes of its leaf, stem and flower. Since type II TEs have not been characterized at the molecular level in cowpea, this study was initiated to survey the presence of type II TEs in the cowpea genome. Type II TEs: Enhancer/Suppr...

—Seed predation has the potential to strongly reduce seed production and thereby act as a selective force on the evolution of flowering traits and other defenses against herbivory. We characterized levels of predispersal seed predation on Hibiscus moscheutos (Malvaceae) during 2001 and 2002 at four sites in Ohio and Maryland, USA. The seed predators were a weevil, Conotrachelus fissinguis (Cole...