The biology and behavior of the longhorned beetle Dectes texanus LeConte (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) was studied on two host plants that suffer economic losses from this pest; sunflower, Helianthus annuus, and soybean, Glycines max. Reciprocal crosses of D. texanus collected from the two plants all produced viable progeny, indicating that conspecific insects attack both crops. Pupae from soybean...

Lentz et al. (1) cite linguistic evidence supporting their hypothesis that Helianthus annuus was domesticated in Mesoamerica in pre-Columbian times. This consists, in part, of a list of names for sunflower collected from speakers of 14 contemporary native languages. They conclude that the fact that terms for sunflower in 11 of these languages do not phonologically resemble Spanish words for sun...

Genetic analyses of the domestication syndrome have revealed that domestication-related traits typically have a very similar genetic architecture across most crops, being conditioned by a small number of quantitative trait loci (QTL), each with a relatively large effect on the phenotype. To date, the domestication of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) stands as the only counterexample to this pat...

Sunflower is an important oilseed crop, however the genetic transformation of sunflower has been very challenging to date. In the present study, we describe a successful Agrobacterium-mediated transformation approach via somatic embryogenesis from immature zygotic embryos of sunflower. By optimizing the culture medium, we have achieved high efficiency (45.5%) of somatic embryogenesis with MS me...

From late July to early November 1979, 1980, and 1982, red-winged blackbirds were collected in sunflower, field corn, and at two roosts in Cass County, North Dakota. Their espophageal contents were examined, and they were also assessed for stage of molt. Both males and females contained a higher proportion of sunflower in sunflower fields than corn in field corn (P < 0.05). Male redwings consum...

The objective of this study was to manufacture new biodegradable fiberboards by thermo-pressing. The starting material was deoiled cake (only 0.9% oil content), generated during the biorefinery of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) whole plant in a co-rotating twin-screw extruder. All fiberboards were cohesive mixtures of proteins and lignocellulosic fibers, acting respectively as binder and rein...

The large gap between the availability and requirements of animal feeds necessitated the exploration of alternate unconventional feeds for their use in livestock rations. Pongamia pinnata Pierre (Hindi — Karanj) seed cake is available in large quantity, i.e. 80 thousand tonnes/annum in India and it contains about 300g crude protein/ kg. However, raw karanj cake (KC) is not commonly used as a fe...

Pasteurized shell eggs are eggs that have been thermally treated to eliminate harmful bacteria, however the treatment may also denature some of the egg white proteins. In this study the degree of denaturation and functional properties (emulsifying, foaming, and gelling properties) of egg white obtained from pasteurized eggs (EWP) were compared with those of unpasteurized eggs (EWUP). Data from ...

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been the consolidator for many ideas regarding the evolution of the World Wide Web (WWW), including the promotion of the so-called “Semantic Layer Cake” model for the development of the semantic web. The semantic layer cake provides a framework to discuss a variety of approaches to an integrated view of the meta-data that will support a broad range of mac...

BACKGROUND Regardless of the overall association between diet and acne which cannot be easily ignored, there might be an association between specific nutrients and acne development or improvement. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to assess the effect of dietary intake of sunflower seeds on acne severity and the pattern of acne lesions. PATIENTS AND METHODS In a randomized controlled tri...