THE SENESCENCE (PROTEOLYSIS AND LOSS OF CHLOROPHYLL) OF ISOLATED LEAVES OF OAT SEEDLINGS IN THE DARK IS INHIBITED OR DELAYED BY COMPOUNDS OF SIX DIFFERENT TYPES: phenazine methosulfate, fusicoccin, alpha,alpha'-dipyridyl, cycloheximide, spermidine, and two cytokinins. In every case but the last, these compounds in optimum concentration caused the stomata to open and remain partly or completely ...

The average opening rate of Vicia faba L. stomata was determined over an initial 20-minute light period following darkness. Nonsaturating intensities of broad band red and blue light had similar quantum effectiveness for the promotion of opening, whereas broad band green was about 40% and far red about 5% as effective. The opening rates under saturating red, green, and blue light were the same....

Single molecule data made of on and off events are ubiquitous. Famous examples include enzyme turnover, probed via fluorescence, and opening and closing of ion-channel, probed via the flux of ions. The data reflects the dynamics in the underlying multi-substate on-off kinetic scheme (KS) of the process, but the determination of the underlying KS is difficult, and sometimes even impossible, due ...

Inward-rectifying potassium (K+(in)) channels in guard cells have been suggested to provide a pathway for K+ uptake into guard cells during stomatal opening. To test the proposed role of guard cell K+(in) channels in light-induced stomatal opening, transgenic Arabidopsis plants were generated that expressed dominant negative point mutations in the K+(in) channel subunit KAT1. Patch-clamp analys...

A novel signal representation using fuzzy mathematical morphology is developed. We take advantage of the optimum fuzzy fitting and the efficient implementation of morphological operators to extract geometric information from signals. The new representation provides results analogous to those given by the polynomial transform. Geometrical decomposition of a signal is achieved by windowing and ap...

Circadian resonance, whereby a plant's endogenous rhythms are tuned to match environmental cues, has been repeatedly shown to be adaptive, although the underlying mechanisms remain elusive. Concomitantly, the adaptive value of nocturnal transpiration in C3 plants remains unknown because it occurs without carbon assimilation. These seemingly unrelated processes are interconnected because circadi...

A methodology for locating the optic disc (OD) in digital retinal images is presented in this paper. Input images are intensity images (I channel of the HSI color space), resized to have a retinal diameter of 300 pixels. A shade-correction method for homogenizing the background, as well as, a set of morphological opening and closing operations for enhancing bright structures, are applied to fin...

Phototropins (phot1 and phot2) are suggested to be multifunctional blue-light (BL) receptors mediating phototropism, chloroplast movement, stomatal opening, and leaf expansion. The Arabidpsis phot1 phot2 double mutant lacks all of these responses. To confirm the requirement of phototropins in BL responses, the Arabidopsis phot1 phot2 double mutant was transformed with PHOT1 cDNA and the phenoty...

Paphiopedilum and Cypripedium are close relatives in the subfamily Cypripedioideae. Cypripedium leaves contain guard cell chloroplasts, whereas Paphiopedilum do not. It is unclear whether the lack of guard cell chloroplasts affects photosynthetic induction, which is important for understory plants to utilize sunflecks. To understand the role of guard cell chloroplasts in photosynthetic inductio...