BACKGROUND AND AIMS Reduction in female fitness in large clones can occur as a result of increased geitonogamous self-fertilization and its influence through inbreeding depression. This possibility was investigated in the self-compatible, bee-pollinated perennial herb Aconitum kusnezoffii which varies in clone size. METHODS Field investigations were conducted on pollinator behaviour, flowerin...

The three primate species of Santa Rosa National Park, Costa Rica (Ateles geoffroyi, Alouatta palliata, Cebus capucinus) have diets in which fruits are major components. All three primate species defecated seeds of many fruiting species; the majority of which (60%) germinated under experimental conditions. The sampling of seed traps placed throughout he forest indicated that, on average, 392 la...

In vitro organogenesis may provide a method to reduce the very large number of observations required for in planta studies on seed set in Fagopyrum esculentum. Plants were regenerated from leaf petiole explant tissue of buckwheat seedlings. Maximum shoot regeneration was induced on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium containing Gamborg’s vitamins, 6-benzylaminopurine (BA), 6, -dimethylallylamino-pu...

The notion of “strength of connectedness” between pixels has been successfully used in image segmentation. We present extensions to these works, which can considerably improve the efficiency of object delineation tasks. A set of pixels is said to be a κ-connected component with respect to a seed pixel, when the strength of connectedness of any pixel in that set with respect to the seed is highe...

Many widely known invasive plants are well integrated into native plant–pollinator networks. Typically, these invaders have entomophilous flowerswhich are visited by a diverse array of pollinators. The type of breeding system and the role that pollination services play in the reproductive success of invasive plants have, however, received little attention. We studied the breeding system and pol...

As a motivating application for the study of lattice in cryptography we consider the construction of pseudorandom generators. We recall that a pseudorandom generator is a program G(x) (computable in deterministic polynomial time) that maps bitstrings x ∈ {0, 1} to longer strings G(x) ∈ {0, 1} such that, if x is chosen uniformly at random and kept secret, then the output G(x) will “look” random ...

Approximately one-third of our food globally comes from insect-pollinated crops. The dependence on pollinators has been linked to yield instability, which could potentially become worse in a changing climate. Insect-pollinated crops produced via hybrid breeding (20% of fruit and vegetable production globally) are especially at risk as they are even more reliant on pollinators than open-pollinat...

There has been a heated argument over self-incompatibilityof chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum morifolium) among chrysanthemum breeders. In order to solve the argument, we investigated pistil receptivity, seed set, and compatible index of 24 chrysanthemum cultivars. It was found that the 24 cultivars averagely had 3.7-36.3 pollen grains germinating on stigmas at 24 hours after self-pollination throu...

Phylogenetic relationships among seed plant taxa, especially within the gymnosperms, remain contested. In contrast to angiosperms, for which several genomic, transcriptomic and phylogenetic resources are available, there are few, if any, molecular markers that allow broad comparisons among gymnosperm species. With few gymnosperm genomes available, recently obtained transcriptomes in gymnosperms...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Considerable variation in seed size commonly exists within plants, and is believed to be favoured under natural selection. This study aims to examine the extent to which seed size distribution depends on the presence of competing neighbour plants. METHODS Phaseolus vulgaris plants rooting with or without a conspecific neighbour were grown in soil with high or low nutrient ...