Red flowers have evolved repeatedly across angiosperms and are frequently examined in an ecological context. However, less is known about the biochemical basis of red colouration in different taxa. In this study, we examine the spectral properties, anthocyanin composition and carotenoid expression of red flowers in the tomato family, Solanaceae, which have evolved independently multiple times a...

A Preliminary Study of Threonine Deaminase Duplication in Solanaceae

The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) draft genome, along with a draft of the wild relative, Solanum pimpinellifolium, were released in 2012, almost a decade after the International Tomato Genome project was initiated. Tomato is an important domesticated crop species, as well as a model organism for many aspects of plant biology such as fleshy fruit development, ripening, disease resistance, plant ...

Small RNAs regulate the genome by guiding transcriptional and post-transcriptional silencing machinery to specific target sequences, including genes and transposable elements (TEs). Although miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) are closely associated with euchromatic genes, the broader functional impact of these short TE insertions in genes is largely unknown. We identified 2...

The methanol extracts from five different plant families (Asteraceae, Euphorbiaceae, Melastomataceae, Rubiaceae, and Solanaceae) collected at Regional Natural Park Ucumarí (Colombia), were screened for their acetylcholinesterase inhibitory activity through the modified Ellman's spectrophotometric method. The best inhibitory activities on this study were shown by the extracts of Solanum leucocar...

the beet armyworm spodoptera exigua (hübner) is a serious and economically important pest of solanaceous crops worldwide. the nutritional indices of this pest on three host plants including pepper capsicum frutescens, eggplant solanum melongena and tomato solanum lycopersicum were determined under laboratory conditions at 26 ± 1 °c, 60 ± 5% rh and 16: 8 (l: d) h. the highest relative consumptio...

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies make possible the sequencing of the whole genome of a species decoding a complete gene catalogue and transcriptome to al‐ low the study of expression pattern of entire genes. The huge data generated through whole genome and transcriptome sequencing not only provide a basis to study variation at gene sequence (such as single-nucleotide polymorphism a...

Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera Dunal., Solanaceae) is one of the most reputed medicinal plants of Ayurveda, the traditional medical system. Several of its traditionally proclaimed medicinal properties have been corroborated by recent molecular pharmacological investigations and have been shown to be associated with its specific secondary metabolites known as withanolides, the novel group of er...