China harbors one of the most species-rich floras in the world. This plant diversity is currently severely threatened by high levels of habitat degradation and unsustainable resource extraction, the country’s exceptionally fast economic growth, an uncontrolled increase in tourism, invasive species, and climate change. Furthermore, China’s current system of protected areas is ineffective at cons...

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0), which permits unrestricted noncommercial use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited and the new work is distributed under the same license as the original. The understanding of the genetic basis of phenotypic and ecological divergences b...

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) integrates data from more than 20 biological databases through a flexible search and retrieval system called Entrez. A core Entrez database, Entrez Nucleotide, includes GenBank and is tightly linked to the NCBI Taxonomy database, the Entrez Protein database, and the scientific literature in PubMed. A suite of more specialized databases fo...

Ayurveda, the ancient Indian science of health mainly based on plant drugs is of late, regaining the confidence of the people in India and abroad. Quite ironically, our vegetal wealth is getting more and more impoverished due to indiscriminate deforestation. This is ominous for Ayurveda and its enthusiasts. The article highlights the portends that this devastation holds for this science. Probab...

In the last 30 years legal developments at national and international levels have completely reshaped the ways in which plant genetic resources are used in global agriculture. This article explores some of the legal changes that affect access to plant germplasm. It also discusses developments that have affected and will in the future specifically impact upon the practices of international agric...

PLEXdb (http://www.plexdb.org), in partnership with community databases, supports comparisons of gene expression across multiple plant and pathogen species, promoting individuals and/or consortia to upload genome-scale data sets to contrast them to previously archived data. These analyses facilitate the interpretation of structure, function and regulation of genes in economically important plan...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Despite the extensive phenotypic variation that characterizes the Gesneriaceae family, there is a lack of genomic resources to investigate the molecular basis of their diversity. We developed and compared the transcriptomes for two species of the Neotropical lineage of the Gesneriaceae. METHODS AND RESULTS Illumina sequencing and de novo assembly of floral and leaf sample...

Masaru Takeya, Fukuhiro Yamasaki, Shihomi Uzuhashi, Hiroyuki Sawada, Toshirou Nagai, Keisuke Tomioka, Toyozo Sato, Takayuki Aoki, Makoto Kawase Genetic Resources Conservation Research Unit, NIAS, Classification and Evaluation Research Unit, NIAS, Genetic Resources Center, NIAS A database of plant diseases in Japan was constructed and is available on the NIAS website. The database contains more...

Skimmia anquetilia is an important medicinal plant of west Himalaya. The present study was devised to determine the impact of the habitat variability and altitude on the morphological and resource allocation pattern of the species under study. The present investigation revealed extensive variability in morphological parameters both within and across the individuals of different populations. The...