drought is the most significant constraint for crop production in arid and semi-arid regions. in order to assess drought tolerance in fifteen rapeseed (brassica napus) cultivars using yield-based drought tolerance indices, two experiments were conducted at the research station of college of agriculture, shiraz university, shiraz, iran during 2009-2010 growing season. the cultivars were arranged...

Aluminum (Al) toxicity is the key factor limiting wheat production in acid soils. Soil liming has been used widely to increase the soil pH, but due to its high cost, breeding tolerant cultivars is more cost-effective mean to mitigate the problem. Tolerant cultivars could be developed by traditional breeding, genetic transformation or introgression of genes from wild relatives. We used 30 wheat ...

Onion thrips, Thrips tabaci Lindeman (Thysanoptera: Thripidae), is a worldwide pest of onion, Allium cepa L. In field studies on onion resistance conducted in 2007 and 2008 using 49 cultivars, 11 showed low leaf damage by T. tabaci. In laboratory studies, the 11 cultivars, along with two susceptible checks and four additional cultivars, were evaluated to characterize resistance to T. tabaci and...

Plant genome editing tools as Zinc-Finger Nucleases (ZFNs), Trans Activator-Like Effector (TALENs), and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) associated with Cas proteins are offering new possibilities for crop improvement insights functional genomics. In this review, we discuss (i) the findings in gene technologies, (ii) a comparison between them, (iii) their appli...

The potato leafhopper, Empoasca fabae (Harris) (Hemiptera: Cicadellidae), is an emerging pest of potato and insecticide applications to control this insect have increased in recent years. Based on field observations of leafhopper-crop dynamics, however, currently recommended action thresholds seem to be overly conservative. As a result, we initiated two experiments designed to quantify the impa...

the mustard aphid, lipaphis erysimi kalt, is one of the most severe pests of brassica species in iran and other tropical regions in the world. seven cultivars of three brassica species including b. napus (cv. licord, elite, okapi, hyola 401, and rgs003), b. juncea (cv. land race) and b. rapa (cv. park land) were evaluated to study the antixenosis and antibiosis resistance to l. erysimi under gr...

Using a series of multiplexed experiments we studied the quantitative changes in protein abundance of three Australian bread wheat cultivars (Triticum aestivum L.) in response to a drought stress. Three cultivars differing in their ability to maintain grain yield during drought, Kukri (intolerant), Excalibur (tolerant), and RAC875 (tolerant), were grown in the glasshouse with cyclic drought tre...

Growing resistant cultivars is the best method of protecting the crops against Potato virus Y (PVY). There are a few sources of PVY resistance/tolerance in tobacco acquired through mass selection, X-ray induced mutagenesis and introgressions from wild Nicotiana species. Here, we compare major sources of PVY resistance/tolerance in inoculation tests using ten PVY isolates collected in Central Eu...

The effects of infection by tobacco cyst nematode (Globodera tabacum solanacearum) on growth of flue-cured tobacco cultivars NC 567 (resistant) and K 326 (susceptible) were evaluated in the field in 1993 and 1994. Infection by G. t. solanacearum suppressed number of leaves, plant height, and fresh weight of leaves and feeder roots. Correlations between weekly egg densities of G. t. solanacearum...