Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus), cantaloupe or muskmelon (Cucumis melo), squash (Cucurbita pepo), bitter gourd (Momordica charantia), and cucumber sativa) are commonly grown throughout Florida on both commercial farms home gardens, while pumpkin maxima) production is largely limited to north Florida. Anthracnose cucurbits, caused by the fungus Colletotrichum orbiculare, a common disease that occ...

Introduction: Squirting cucumber, Ecballium elaterium (L.) A. Rich. (Cucurbitaceae), is a wild medicinal plant found abundantly in the Mediterranean region. It has been utilized as a rootstock for many cucurbitaceous crops, mainly attributed to its resistance to abiotic as well as biotic stress (2). Important pharmacological uses (1, 9) are attributed to the bitter principles, cucurbitacins (5)...

Herbarium specimens deposited in publicly accessible collections are the basis for all scientific names because only permanent specimens can be re-studied by independent researchers, the very essence of science. Re-investigations may be done with morphological, chemical, genomic, computer-tomographic, or other methods. Based on new herbarium material, I here provide a name for the Xishuangbanna...

Given the economic importance of cucurbits and the losses incurred by fruit fly infestation, the population dynamics of fruit flies in cucurbit crops and the influence of abiotic parameters, such as temperature, relative humidity, rainfall, and total sunshine hours per day on the fruit fly population were studied. The study was carried out at six locations; in district Srinagar the locations we...

Population abundance of red spider mite, Tetranychus urticae Koch., was studied in cucmber, ribbed gourd, bitter gourd, snake gourd, aroids and teasle gourd and efficacy of four new acaricides were tested against this pest in brinjal at the farmer’s field of Norsingdi during 2009-2010. At the same time, the spatial distribution of this pest in brinjal crop was also studied. Results indicated th...

Cucurbits comprise the highly diverse family known as Cucurbitaceae that includes cultivated, feral, and wild species (Robinson and Decker-Walters, 1997). Many of the cultivated species such as squash (Cucurbita ssp.), watermelon [Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.) Matsum. & Nakai], cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.), and melon (Cucumis melo L.) are familiar to U.S. and world markets. Others such as bitter ...

The phytohormone auxin regulates various developmental programs in plants, including cell growth, cell division and cell differentiation. The auxin efflux carriers are essential for the auxin transport. To show an involvement of auxin transporters in the coordination of fruit development in bitter gourd, a juicy fruit, we isolated novel cDNAs (referred as McPIN) encoding putative auxin efflux c...

Bitterness in cucumber fruit and foliage is due to the presence of cucurbitacins. Several genes have been described that control the trait, with bi (bi-1) making fruit and foliage bitter free and Bt (Bt-1) making the fruit highly bitter. Previous studies have reported the inheritance and molecular markers linked to bi-1 or Bt-1, but we were interested in studying the inheritance of fruit bitter...

Gibberellic acid-stimulated in Arabidopsis (GASA), a unique small molecular protein of plants, plays an essential role plant growth and development. The GASA family genes have been identified studied many plants. However, the identification gene Cucurbitaceae species has not reported yet. Therefore, this study, based on available genome information species, 10 including cucumber (Cucumis sativu...