The seeds and fruits derived from the sexual reproduction of flowering plants constitute the major part of the human diet. Our capacity to generate sufficient crop yield is increasingly compromised by human population expansion, competition for land use, biodiversity loss, and global climate change. Hot days and heat waves are predicted to increase in frequency and intensity in many temperate r...

Plants growing in different environments develop with different photosynthetic capacities--developmental acclimation of photosynthesis. It is also possible for fully developed leaves to change their photosynthetic capacity--dynamic acclimation. The importance of acclimation has not previously been demonstrated. Here, we show that developmental and dynamic acclimation are distinct processes. Fur...

Drosophila ananassae has successfully invaded the cold and dry montane localities of the Western Himalayas in recent years. The ability of this desiccation- and cold-sensitive tropical species to evolve in response to seasonal changes in montane localities is largely unknown. Here, we investigated how this sensitive species adapt to seasonally varying environmental conditions that are lethal to...

The snow-cover on soil, the factor that protects wheat from the biting cold, has generally declined; on the other hand, the surface air temperature has warmed. It is not clear whether these changes decrease winter-killing of wheat or favor it in Iran. Therefore, this study was mainly aimed to determine the past trend in frequency of winter-kill events (Y) for wheat with -4 oC frost tolerance, u...

Time-courses of the development of freezing tolerance and the expression of a cold-responsive gene wlt10 were monitored during cold acclimation in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). Bioassay showed that cold acclimation conferred much higher freezing tolerance on a winter cultivar than a spring cultivar. Northern blot analysis showed that the expression of wlt10 encoding a novel wheat member of a ce...

In many reptiles, the thermal regimes experienced by eggs in natural nests vary as a function of ambient weather and location, and this variation has important impacts on patterns of embryonic development. Recent advances in non-invasive measurement of embryonic heart rates allow us to answer a long-standing puzzle in reptilian developmental biology: Do the metabolic and developmental rates of ...