Fur animal farming was initiated during the 1890s on Prince Edward Island in Canada. Farmed silver foxes descend from animals caught from the wild on the island. Finnish fur farming increased during the post war period and in mid-1980s, there were about 6000 fur animal farms, mostly located in Southern Ostrobothnia (Fig.), producing about 8 million fur animals yearly. Currently, there are appro...

Lower plants generate mobile sperm cells that must reach their female counterparts by swimming. This requirement for water is a disadvantage for these plants as compared with angiosperms, for which the dry pollen attaches to a stigma and becomes hydrated, enabling the emerging pollen tube to grow in the protected environment of the pistil. After adhesion, hydration, and germination of the polle...

During embryonic development of multicellular organisms, a variety of cell types undergo temporally and spatially controlled cell migrations. Although cell motility is believed to involve dynamic changes in cell adhesion and rearrangement of the cytoskeleton, the molecular mechanisms regulating these activities are not well understood. In addition, the factors controlling the coordination of mi...

The plant embryo is supported by a lifeline known as a suspensor that acts like an umbilical cord, connecting the embryo to surrounding tissues in the seed and ferrying in vital nutrients and growth factors. Although scientists have for a century known that the suspensor is a temporary organ, the molecular trigger for its demise was unknown. Now Mengxiang Sun at Wuhan University in China and hi...

In January 2003, fecal samples from 13 live pygmy rabbits, Brachylagus idahoensis (Merriam, 1891), were collected at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Oregon, and sent to the University of New Mexico (UNM), Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be examined for coccidia. In July 2004, 14 more fecal samples were collected and sent to UNM, 6 from some of the same rabbits and 8 from 16 other rabbits (4 were pooled...

When animals copulate, the male organ penetrates the female. Similarly, the pollen tube of a flowering plant (the male gametophyte) penetrates the embryo sac (the female gametophyte) and then discharges its contents, which include male gametes. Details of the interaction between the pollen tube and the embryo sac are difficult to observe because of the large number of opaque ovular cells that u...

Iris lactea seed is characterized mainly by physiological dormancy. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of NaOH treatment and stratification on Iris seed germination. In Experiment 1, seeds were treated with 14.38 M NaOH for 0 to 28 hours. In Experiment 2, NaOH treated and nontreated seeds were stratified under 7 °C and moistened condition for 0 to 40 days. As results, NaOH...

Phenotypic and genetic analyses demonstrate that fs( 1) Yb activity is required in the soma for the development of a subset of ovarian follicle cells and to support later stages of egg maturation. Mutations in f s ( 1 ) Yb cause a range of ovarian phenotypes, from the improper segregation of egg chambers to abnormal dorsal appendage formation. The mutant phenotypes associated with fs( I) Yb are...

Lateral gene transfer (LGT) refers to the transmission of genetic material without sexual reproduction. LGT is widespread in a number plant species, including grasses. But how these genes foreign origin got there presently unknown. In this review, we show that transformation techniques used genetically modify organisms could occur wild and be responsible for frequently observed grass-to-grass L...