Trees will have to cope with increasing levels of CO(2) and ozone in the atmosphere. The purpose of this work was to assess whether the lignification process could be altered in the wood of poplars under elevated CO(2) and/or ozone. Young poplars were exposed either to charcoal-filtered air (control), to elevated CO(2) (800 μl l(-1)), to ozone (200 nl l(-1)) or to a combination of elevated CO(2...

Non-chemical control of plant growth is an important goal for the production of ornamental pot plants. In the present study the effects of simulated vibration on plant height and some physical and mechanical properties of Coleus stem were investigated. The study was conducted as a factorial experiment based on a completely randomized design with three replications. Vibration stresses were perfo...

prior to the design and construction of any fruit harvesting machine it is essential to know the physical and mechanical properties of the trees and of its fruits. an example could be cited as the force needed to overcome. the strength with which the fruit is attached to the stem, in trunk shaker harvesting. in this research the acting forces on the fruit during harvest, including tensile stren...

Lignin is a complex polyphenolic heteropolymer that is abundant in the secondary cell walls of plants and functions in growth and defence. It is also a major barrier to the deconstruction of plant biomass for bioenergy production, but the spatiotemporal details of how lignin is deposited in actively lignifying tissues and the precise relationships between wall lignification in different cell ty...

Improving digestibility of roughage cell walls will improve ruminant animal performance and reduce loss of nutrients to the environment. The main digestibility impediment for dicotyledonous plants is highly lignified secondary cell walls, notably in stem secondary xylem, which become almost non-digestible. Digestibility of grasses is slowed severely by lignification of most tissues, but these c...

We report the fracture of a cementless long stem in a distally fixated, extensively porous-coated femoral prosthesis used for revisional total hip arthroplasty (THA) 9 years previously in a 48-year-old woman, measuring 58 kg in weight and 155 cm in height. Following resolution of an infection 7 years after the revisional THA, a series of posterior dislocations occurred up until 7 months before ...

The lignification of the leaf vein bundle sheath (BS) has been observed in many species and would reduce conductance from xylem to mesophyll. We hypothesized that lignification of the BS in lower-order veins would provide benefits for water delivery through the vein hierarchy but that the lignification of higher-order veins would limit transport capacity from xylem to mesophyll and leaf hydraul...

To provide data and methods for analyzing stem mechanics, we investigated bending, density and growth characteristics of 207 specimens of fresh wood from different heights and radial positions of the stem of one mature Norway spruce (Picea abies L. Karst.) tree. From the shape of each stress-strain curve, which was calculated from bending tests that accounted for shear deformation, we determine...

Zinnia elegans constitutes one of the most useful model systems for studying xylem differentiation, which simultaneously involves secondary cell wall synthesis, cell wall lignification, and programmed cell death. Likewise, the in vitro culture system of Z. elegans has been the best characterized as the differentiation of mesophyll cells into tracheary elements allows study of the biochemistry a...