Brick manufacturing industries are challenged to comply with clean air mandates. Dry air scrubbers have been used to remove acid gases from the exhaust air from brick manufacturing plants. The use of dry air scrubbers results in the production of large quantities of an alkaline powder by-product. A greenhouse experiment was conducted to evaluate the potential of using dairy lagoon sludge stabil...

The Compositae is one of the largest and most economically important families of flowering plants and includes a diverse array of food crops, horticultural crops, medicinals, and noxious weeds. Despite its size and economic importance, there is no reference genome sequence for the Compositae, which impedes research and improvement efforts. We report on progress toward sequencing the 3.5 Gb geno...

Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) grain and oil quality are defined by grain weight and oil percentage, oil fatty acid composition and the amount of antioxidants. The aim of this work was to establish and validate a simple model, based on published relationships, which can estimate not only yield and its components, but also grain and oil quality aspects which are of relevance for industrial pro...

Lipid and fatty acid compositions were determined for chloroplast envelope membranes isolated from spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.), sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.), and maize (Zea mays L.) leaves. The lipid composition was similar in sunflower, spinach, and undifferentiated maize chloroplast envelope membranes and different in maize mesophyll chloroplast envelope membranes. The predominant lipi...

Changes in flowering time and its regulation by environmental signals have played crucial roles in the evolutionary origin and spread of many cultivated plants. Recent investigations into the genetics of flowering time evolution in the common sunflower, Helianthus annuus, have provided insight into the historical and mechanistic dynamics of this process. Genetic mapping studies have confirmed p...

Freshly harvested sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) seeds are considered to be dormant because they fail to germinate at relatively low temperatures (10 degrees C). This dormancy results mainly from an embryo dormancy and disappears during dry storage. Although endogenous ethylene is known to be involved in sunflower seed alleviation of dormancy, little attention had been paid to the possible ro...

Targeted gene replacement in plastids was used to explore whether the rbcL gene that codes for the large subunit of ribulose-1, 5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, the key enzyme of photosynthetic CO2 fixation, might be replaced with altered forms of the gene. Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) plants were transformed with plastid DNA that contained the rbcL gene from either sunflower (Helianthus an...

The most abundant transposable elements (TEs) in plant genomes are Class I long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons represented by superfamilies gypsy and copia Amplification of these superfamilies directly impacts genome structure and contributes to differential patterns of genome size evolution among plant lineages. Utilizing short-read Illumina data and sequence information from a panel o...

The molecular genetic changes underlying the transformation of wild plants into agricultural weeds are poorly understood. Here we use a sunflower cDNA microarray to detect variation in gene expression between two wild (non-weedy) Helianthus annuus populations from Utah and Kansas and four weedy H. annuus populations collected from agricultural fields in Utah, Kansas, Indiana, and California. Wh...

Hybridization is a natural phenomenon that has been linked in several organismal groups to transposable element derepression and copy number amplification. A noteworthy example involves three diploid annual sunflower species from North America that have arisen via ancient hybridization between the same two parental taxa, Helianthus annuus and H. petiolaris. The genomes of the hybrid species hav...