BACKGROUND Birch pollen is an important outdoor allergen able to aggravate symptoms in atopic dermatitis (AD). Specific immunotherapy (SIT), an established procedure for allergic airway diseases, might also represent an attractive therapeutic option for the causal treatment of allergen-triggered cutaneous symptoms in these patients. Studies with house dust mite SIT have already shown beneficial...

The bilobed stigma of many species in the order Scrophulariales closes in response to touch by an animal pollinator. In hummingbird-pollinated bush monkey flower, Mimulus aurantiacus (Scrophulariaceae), closure is rapid, occurring within seconds of tactile stimulus. We investigated the proximate causes of stigma closure and subsequent reopening in M. aurantiacus, as well as potential costs and ...

Pollen embryogenesis provides exciting opportunities in the areas of breeding and biotechnology as well as representing a convenient model for studying the process of plant cell proliferation in general and embryogenesis in particular. A cell culture system was devised in which immature barley pollen could be cultured as a monolayer trapped between the bottom glass-cover slip of a live-cell cha...

their allotetraploid hybrid, B. napus (Nasrallah and Nas-Plant Cell Biology Research Centre rallah, 1993). Flowers of these plants have dry stigmas School of Botany covered by a waxy cuticle, and successful pollinations University of Melbourne begin when a hydraulic connection is established be-Parkville, VIC 3052 tween a pollen grain and a stigmatic papillar cell, Australia allowing the pollen...

Petunia (Petunia hybrida) pollen requires flavonols (Fl) to germinate. Adding kaempferol to Fl-deficient pollen causes rapid and synchronous germination and tube outgrowth. We exploited this system to identify genes responsive to Fls and to examine the changes in gene expression that occur during the first 0.5 h of pollen germination. We used a subtracted library and differential screening to i...

During maturation, pollen undergoes a period of dehydration accompanied by the accumulation of compatible solutes. Solute import across the pollen plasma membrane, which occurs via proteinaceous transporters, is required to support pollen development and also for subsequent germination and pollen tube growth. Analysis of the free amino acid composition of various tissues in tomato revealed that...

low seed yield is a limiting factor for cross breeding and hybrid seed production in cyclamen. this study was performed to investigate pollen germination and its relation to cross-pollination success and fruit set in this plant. in order to achieve a high level of pollen germination, the effect of different concentrations of chemical compounds were examined on in vitro pollen germination of cyc...

OBJECTIVE To assess the effect of a single aeroallergen on Internet search activity in 3 distinct geographic regions over time. STUDY DESIGN A retrospective time series analysis. SETTING Tertiary academic medical center. METHODS Mountain Cedar pollen counts spanning the periods from 2011 to 2014 were collected for San Antonio, Dallas-Ft Worth, and Houston metro regions (Texas). Google sea...

This paper discusses the characteristic air mass types over the Carpathian Basin in relation to plant pollen levels over annual pollination periods. Based on the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts dataset, daily sea-level pressure fields analysed at 00 UTC were prepared for each air mass type (cluster) in order to relate sea-level pressure patterns to pollen levels in Szeged, Hu...