Understanding the adaptations and the strategies adopted by microorganisms inhabiting environmental ecosystems may provide good guidance for many applications that involve microorganisms. These applications can be useful in different fields such as medicine and pharmaceutical products, industry, biofuels and agriculture. Cyanobacteria in photosynthetic microbial mats have developed fascinating ...

We describe a method for volume rendering using a spectral representation of colour instead of RGB. Full spectra allow the generation of physically correct rendering of a scene under different lighting conditions. To make the method practicable, a new low-dimension subspace method is used to act as the carrier of spectral information. To fully exploit spectra, we introduce the technique of post...

The human visual system is highly sensitive to biological motion and manages to organize even a highly reduced point-light stimulus into a vivid percept of human action. The current study investigated to what extent the origin of this saliency of point-light displays is related to its intrinsic Gestalt qualities. In particular, we studied whether biological motion perception is facilitated when...

The C4 photosynthesis carbon-concentrating mechanism in maize (Zea mays) has two CO2 delivery pathways to the bundle sheath (BS; viamalate or aspartate), and rates of phosphoglyceric acid reduction, starch synthesis, and phosphoenolpyruvate regeneration also vary between BS andmesophyll (M) cells. The theoretical partitioning of ATP supply betweenM and BS cells was derived for thesemetabolic ac...

Paphiopedilum and Cypripedium are close relatives in the subfamily Cypripedioideae. Cypripedium leaves contain guard cell chloroplasts, whereas Paphiopedilum do not. It is unclear whether the lack of guard cell chloroplasts affects photosynthetic induction, which is important for understory plants to utilize sunflecks. To understand the role of guard cell chloroplasts in photosynthetic inductio...

Pinellia ternate (Thunb.) Breit (Araceae) is a shade-tolerant perennial medicinal plant, but its optimum light intensity is not sufficiently known. Hence, the influence of light intensity on the physiological responses, growth and secondary metabolic products in P. ternata under four light conditions (15%, 25%, 45% and 100% of full sunlight) in a greenhouse were to be investigated. The results ...

Individual members of the Arabidopsis thaliana ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase small subunit (rbcS) gene family are differentially regulated by light of different qualities. In 10-d-old etiolated seedlings, the expression of only three of the four genes is under inductive phytochrome control. rbcS mRNA levels reach a maximum (3- to 5-fold higher than the dark level) about 6 h af...

Healing and acclimatization are critical in vegetable grafting under controlled environments. Here, we investigated the impacts of LED light qualities on morphological traits photosynthetic performance grafted tomato seedlings. Seeds tomatoes “DRW 7806 F1” “Maxifort” (Solanum lycopersicum × Solanum habrochaites) used as scion rootstock were planted 104-cell plug trays into a mixture cocopeat pe...

Senescence is a genetically controlled process whose regulation depends on many factors. Leaf senescence begins with the catabolism of chlorophyll and macromolecules such as proteins and membrane lipids, a process that is accompanied by the alteration of organelles and, ultimately, the breakdown of nuclear components. In annual plants, reproduction is the main event that triggers leaf senescenc...