This study aimed at evaluating commonly used maize varieties, collected from Melkasa and Bako Agricultural Research Centers and Haramaya University, Ethiopia, against the maize weevil Sitophilus zeamais Motsch., one of the most important cosmopolitan stored product pests in maize. A total of 13 improved maize varieties were screened for their relative susceptibility to S. zeamais. The Dobie ind...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the protective effect of Herpetospermum pedunculosum (H. pedunculosum) seed oil against carbon tetrachloride (CCl4)-induced liver damage. METHODS This experimental study was conducted at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Yantai University, China from November 2012 to May 2013. The H. pedunculosum seed oil was extracted using...

Seeds are important to agriculture and conservation of plant biodiversity. In agriculture, seed germination performance is an important determinant of crop yield, in particular under adverse climatic conditions. Deterioration in seed quality is associated with the accumulation of cellular damage to macromolecules including lipids, protein, and DNA. Mechanisms that mitigate the deleterious cellu...

The damage of seeds in grain augers has been divided into shearing and jamming, occurring at the inlet and the casing wall, respectively. The shearing was strongly reduced by a displacement body attached to the screw blade. Measures for the reduction of jamming, partly based on a theoretical approximation, have been summarized. A number of experiments, performed for verification, agreed with th...

Blackbirds cause extensive damage to newly planted and ripening rice. To date there is not a registered bird repellent for reducing this damage. We evaluated Flight ControlK, a 50' anthraquinone product, as a potential repellent to blackbirds in cagc and field tests in Louisiana. In oneand no-choice cage tests, brown-headed cowbird and red-winged blackbird consumption of 2%) Flight controlR tre...

BACKGROUND The effect of herbivory on plant fitness varies widely. Understanding the causes of this variation is of considerable interest because of its implications for plant population dynamics and trait evolution. We experimentally defoliated the annual herb Arabidopsis thaliana in a natural population in Sweden to test the hypotheses that (a) plant fitness decreases with increasing damage, ...

Loss in seed yield and therefore decrease in plant fitness due to simultaneous attacks by multiple herbivores is not necessarily additive, as demonstrated in evolutionary studies on wild plants. However, it is not clear how this transfers to crop plants that grow in very different conditions compared to wild plants. Nevertheless, loss in crop seed yield caused by any single pest is most often s...

To investigate the existence of coordinated sets of seedling traits adapted to contrasting establishment conditions, we examined evolutionary convergence in seedling traits for 299 French Guianan woody plant species and the stress response in a shadehouse of species representing seed size gradients within five major cotyledon morphology types. The French Guianan woody plant community has larger...

The authors evaluated the effectiveness of ReJeX-iT@ AG-145, Mesurola, activated charcoal, lime, and fipronil to reduce homed lark damage to lettuce seeds and seedlings. In Experiment 1, homed larks consumed significantly more feed mixture (50:50 grains and lettuce seed) than untreated clay-coated lettuce seed in a three-day choice-test. In Experiment 2, where clay-coated lettuce seed was treat...

Oxidation of biomolecules such as carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids results in generation of free radicals in an organism which is the major cause of onset of various degenerative diseases. Antioxidants scavenge these free radicals, thereby protecting the cell from damage. The present study was designed to examine the free radical scavenging potential and oxidative DNA damage p...