Tetrastigma (Miq.) Planch. is one of the most species-rich genera of the economically and agronomically important grape family Vitaceae. It includes ca. 95 species widely distributed in the tropics and subtropics of Asia and Australia. Species of Tetrastigma exhibit great diversity in both vegetative and reproductive characters. Here we inferred a well-supported phylogeny of Tetrastigma based o...

DAD3 is a parallel tree-structured machine designed to provide highly significant performance improvements in the execution of large Production systems. The DAD0 machine comprises a large (on the order of a hundred thousand) set of processing elements (PE's), each containing its awn processor, a small amount (2K bytes, in the current design) of local random access memory, and a specialized I/O ...

The role of water erosion on seed loss and on plant establishment and distribution is unknown on the Chinese Loess Plateau, which suffers serious soil erosion. The seed susceptibility of 16 local species to removal by water erosion from loess slopes was determined by rainfall simulation experiments. The experiments were performed on slopes with gradients of 10°, 15°, 20° and 25° for a 60-min du...

such as rice to weedy or red rice (Oryza spp.) (Oard et al., 2000; Gealy et al., 2003; Zhang et al., 2003). SystemSeed dormancy, a major adaptive trait in plants, facilitates the atic research is required to understand how seed dorsurvival of weeds and provides for resistance to preharvest sprouting (PHS) in cereal crops. Seventeen weedy strains and 24 cultivars of mancy and other characteristi...

Quantifying the relative importance of the multiple processes that limit recruitment may hold the key to understanding tropical tree diversity. Here we couple theoretical models with a large-scale, multi-species seed-sowing experiment to assess the degree to which seed and establishment limitation shape patterns of tropical tree seedling recruitment in a central African forest. Of five randomly...

Seed predation, an omnipresent phenomenon in tropical rain forests, is an important determinant of plant recruitment and forest regeneration. Although seed predation destroys large amounts of the seed crop of numerous tropical species, in many cases individual seed damage is only partial. The extent to which partial seed predation affects the recruitment of new individuals in the population dep...

Traits such as grain shape, panicle length and seed shattering, play important roles in grain yield and harvest. In this study, the cloning and functional analysis of PANICLE TRAITS 2 (PT2), a novel gene from the Indica rice Chuandali (CDL), is reported. PT2 is synonymous with Growth-Regulating Factor 4 (OsGRF4), which encodes a growth-regulating factor that positively regulates grain shape and...