There is no easy way to identify to species, a small, vegetative leaf or culm sample of a grass and there are more than 12,000 species in this large, important family. The long-range aim of our study is to produce a standard DNA barcode library available to the public for all grasses (±1960 species) in North America (includes all Canada, Mexico and USA) that will facilitate the easy identificat...

BACKGROUND The recently proposed recircumscription of the genus Atraphaxis (incl. Atraphaxis section Ovczinnikovia O.V. Yurtseva ex. S. Tavakkoli and Polygonum sect. Spinescentia Boissier (=A. sect. Polygonoides S. Tavakkoli, Kaz. Osaloo & Mozaff.) makes this genus fairly heterogeneous and therefore almost undefinable based on morphology. A critical comprehensive reappraisal of the group is nec...

Locusta migratoria is a classic hemimetamorphosis insect and has caused widespread economic damage to crops as a migratory pest. Researches on the expression pattern of functional genes in L. migratoria have drawn focus in recent years, especially with the release of genome information. Real-time quantitative PCR is the most reproducible and sensitive approach for detecting transcript expressio...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY The opuntias (nopales, prickly pears) are not only culturally, ecologically, economically, and medicinally important, but are renowned for their taxonomic difficulty due to interspecific hybridization, polyploidy, and morphological variability. Evolutionary relationships in these stem succulents have been insufficiently studied; thus, delimitation of Opuntia s.s. and major ...

The first comprehensive molecular phylogenetic reconstruction of the Cichorieae subtribe Lactucinae is provided. Sequences for two datasets, one of the nuclear rDNA ITS region, the other of five concatenated non-coding chloroplast DNA markers including the petD region and the psbA-trnH, 5'trnL((UAA))-trnF, rpl32-trnL((UAG)) and trnQ((UUG))-5'rps16 spacers, were, with few exceptions, newly gener...

The current distribution of most species results from ecological niche, past distribution, and migrations during glacial–interglacial periods in situ evolution. Here, we disentangle the colonization history Saxifraga longifolia Lapeyr., a limestone plant abundant Pyrenees rare other Iberian mountains African Atlas. Our working hypothesis is that shrinkage more extensive previous cold periods. W...

The importance of intronic sequences for expression of the mouse ribosomal protein gene rpL32 was evaluated by transfection experiments with a series of mutant constructs in which one or more of the three rpL32 introns was totally or partially deleted. When transiently transfected into monkey kidney (COS) cells or stably transfected into mouse L cells, a mutant that lacked all three introns was...

The utility of DNA barcoding for identifying representative specimens of the circumpolar tree genus Fraxinus (56 species) was investigated. We examined the genetic variability of several loci suggested in chloroplast DNA barcode protocols such as matK, rpoB, rpoC1 and trnH-psbA in a large worldwide sample of Fraxinus species. The chloroplast intergenic spacer rpl32-trnL was further assessed in ...