Aphids are economically important pests that cause extensive feeding damage and transmit viruses. While some species have a broad host range and cause damage to a variety of crops, others are restricted to only closely related plant species. While probing and feeding aphids secrete saliva, containing effectors, into their hosts to manipulate host cell processes and promote infestation. Aphid ef...

background: herbal distillates had been used for many centuries as herbal medicine in traditional persian medicine. recently, some studies claimed the presence of methanol in different types of herbal distillates which can cause different complications or even death as methanol is highly toxic. the main purpose of this study was to determine methanol content in the commonly-used industrial herb...

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New analytical developments in post-genomic technologies are being introduced to the field of plant ecology. FT-IR fingerprinting coupled with chemometrics via cluster analysis is proposed as a tool for correlating global metabolic changes with abiotic or biotic perturbation and/or interactions. The current study concentrates on detecting chemical responses by inter-species competition between ...

We explore the impact of plant toxicity on the dynamics of a plant-herbivore interaction, such as that of a mammalian browser and its plant forage species, by studying a mathematical model that includes a toxin-determined functional response. In this functional response, the traditional Holling Type 2 response is modified to include the negative effect of toxin on herbivore growth, which can ov...

We used flow cytometry and extensive geographic surveys of herbivore attack to test whether repeated evolution of autotetraploidy in the perennial herb Heuchera grossulariifolia Rydb. (Saxifragaceae) has created evolutionary barriers to attack by the specialist moth herbivore Greya politella (Prodoxidae). We found that the moth has colonized tetraploid as well as diploid populations, has coloni...

The goal of the Plant Ontology Consortium is to produce structured controlled vocabularies, arranged in ontologies, that can be applied to plant-based database information even as knowledge of the biology of the relevant plant taxa (e.g. development, anatomy, morphology, genomics, proteomics) is accumulating and changing. The collaborators of the Plant Ontology Consortium (POC) represent a numb...

Our friends often remind us that scientists are strange beasts. As such, it is fitting that we should rejoice at the release of a major new genome by further scholarship and analysis – using the genome to unravel new elements of plant physiology and evolution. In this Feature Issue we celebrate the completion of the genome of Eucalyptus grandis (Myburg et al., 2014), the first representative of...

many of precision farming studies have shown a high plant-to-plant variability for many crops. this study was conducted to evaluate the plant-to-plant variability of three medicinal crops in comparison with corn as a long term commercial species. thus a field experiment was performed in 2009-2010 in ferdowsi university of mashhad, research farm. in this experiment plant morphological characters...