The rosid clade (70,000 species) contains more than one-fourth of all angiosperm species and includes most lineages of extant temperate and tropical forest trees. Despite progress in elucidating relationships within the angiosperms, rosids remain the largest poorly resolved major clade; deep relationships within the rosids are particularly enigmatic. Based on parsimony and maximum likelihood (M...

Abstract The boll weevil, Anthonomus grandis Boheman (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), is an infamous pest of commercially cultivated cotton, Gossypium hirsutum L. (Malvales: Malvaceae). Once the most important agricultural in United States, weevil spurred unprecedented mobilization federal support and cooperation among stakeholders, culminating eventual eradication species from 98% its invasive ran...

Changes in plants following insect attack are referred to as induced responses. These responses are widely viewed as a form of defence against further insect attack. In the current study we explore whether it is possible to make generalizations about induced plant responses given the unpredictability and variability observed in insect-plant interactions. Experiments were conducted to test for c...

BACKGROUND The study randomly screened leaf extracts of several hundred southern African tree species against important microbial pathogens to determine which taxa have the highest activity and may yield useful products to treat infections in the animal health market. METHODS We determined the antibacterial and antifungal activity of 714 acetone leaf extracts of 537 different tree species aga...

The influence, if any, of 5m wide, feral, herbaceous field borders on pest and beneficial arthropods in commercial cotton, Gossypium hirsutum (L.) (Malvales: Malvaceae), fields was measured through a variety of sampling techniques over three years. In each year, 5 fields with managed, feral vegetation borders and five fields without such borders were examined. Sampling was stratified from the f...

The acquisition and vertical transmission of bacterial symbionts plays an important role in insect evolution and ecology. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying the stable maintenance and control of mutualistic bacteria remain poorly understood. The cotton stainer Dysdercus fasciatus harbours the actinobacterial symbionts Coriobacterium glomerans and Gordonibacter sp. in its midgut. The s...