Heading date and grain weight are two determining agronomic traits of crop yield. To date, molecular factors controlling both heading date and grain weight have not been identified. Here we report the isolation of a hemizygous mutation, heading and grain weight (hgw), which delays heading and reduces grain weight in rice. Analysis of hgw mutant phenotypes indicate that the hemizygous hgw mutati...

Understanding how phenotypic diversity evolves is a major interest of evolutionary biology. Habitat use is an important factor in the evolution of phenotypic diversity of many animal species. Interestingly, male and female phenotypes have been frequently shown to respond differently to environmental variation. At the macroevolutionary level, this difference between the sexes is frequently analy...

The genetic control of grain weight (GW) remains poorly understood. Quantitative trait loci (QTLs) determining the GW of rice were identified using a natural GW mutant, sgw. Using a segregating population derived from sgw (low GW) and cultivar 9311 ('9311'; indica, high GW), the chromosome segment associated with GW was detected on the short arm of chromosome 7. To validate and further refine t...

To study the variation of the mechanical behavior of binary aluminum copper alloys with respect to their microstructure, a numerical simulation of their granular structure was carried out. The microstructures are created by a repeated inclusion of some predefined basic grain shapes into a representative volume element until reaching a given volume percentage of the α-phase. Depending on the gra...

We consider three different non–overlapping germ–grain models, two of which are constructed in a similar fashion. These two models are generalisations of Matérn’s hard–core models. In both cases we start with a homogeneous Poisson process and use the points as centres of convex sets, grains, of the same shape. The process is thinned so that no grains overlap. Two different thinning schemes resu...

The nonuniform characteristics of cleavage cracking across high-angle grain boundaries are analyzed in considerable detail. To break through a grain boundary, a cleavage front would first penetrate across the boundary at its central part, with the side sections being locally arrested. Such a front behavior causes a strong crack trapping effect and a large increase in required crack growth drivi...

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) grain attributes, such as length and shape, milling quality, physicochemical are crucial for varietal development subsequent farm adoption. Thus, it is to comprehend the phenotypic range of these attributes how they relate one another. Therefore, this study analyzed main quality traits in medium-grain rice, namely amylose content (AC), gelatinization temperature (GT), gel...

the shape of wake behind a wind turbine is normally assumed to have a hat shape for the models used in wind farm layout optimization purposes; however, it is know from experimental tests and numerical simulations that this is not a real assumption. in reality, the results of actual measurements and detailed numerical simulation show that the velocity in wake region has a s-shape profile. the pr...