Bacterial communities of rhizospheric soils play an important role in the tolerance and uptake of metal-tolerant/hyperaccumulating plants to metals, e.g. the Cu-tolerant Elsholtzia splendens native to China. In this work, pyrosequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene was firstly applied to investigate the rhizospheric bacterial community of E. splendens grown at Cu contaminated sites. The 47 ph...

ABSTRACT Traditional methods of quantifying Pythium spp. rely on the use of selective media and dilution plating. However, high variability is inherent in this type of enumeration and counts may not be representative of the pathogenic population of Pythium spp. Variable regions of the internal transcribed spacer of the rDNA were used to design species-specific primers for detection and quantifi...

Canopy disturbances such as windthrow events have obvious impacts on forest structure and composition aboveground, but changes in soil microbial communities and the consequences of these changes are less understood.We characterized the densities of a soil-borne pathogenic oomycete (Pythium) and a common saprotrophic zygomycete (Mortierella) in nine pairs of forest gaps created by windthrows and...

A new disease causing wilt and death of adult plants of Phaseolus vulgaris was discovered in plastic-house crops of southeast Spain in 2004. The causal agent was shown to be a Pythium species with a unique type of oogonium ornamentation different from any of the described species. Zoospores were not observed, but globose or subglobose hyphal swellings, intercalary or terminal, were frequently f...

The genus Pythium was erected by Pringsheim in 1858 and placed in the family Saprolegniaceae. By the end of 19th century taxonomic details of the genus had been clarified and many new species had been described. The relationship with other Oomycetes was established and the genus was included in a new family, Pythiaceae, by Schroter in 1897. The fungus Pythium belongs to the subdivision Mastigom...

*Globally, exotic invaders threaten biodiversity and ecosystem function. Studies often report that invading plants are less affected by enemies in their invaded vs home ranges, but few studies have investigated the underlying mechanisms. *Here, we investigated the variation in prevalence, species composition and virulence of soil-borne Pythium pathogens associated with the tree Prunus serotina ...

Transgenic ethylene-insensitive tobacco (Tetr) plants spontaneously develop symptoms of wilting and stem necrosis when grown in nonautoclaved soil. Fusarium oxysporum, F. solani, Thielaviopsis basicola, Rhizopus stolonifer, and two Pythium spp. were isolated from these diseased Tetr plants and demonstrated to be causal agents of the disease symptoms. Pathogenicity of the two Pythium isolates an...

The growth rate and percent survival of Betta splendens when submitted to formulated diet and live food treatments are evaluated. The three different diets were used and designated as: formulated diet (basal diet); live food diet (plankton) and mixed diet (formulated diet with plankton). The live food diet contained plankton belonging to an open pond. High mortality was reported with live food ...

In the present study, the importance of temperature, individual size and habitat arrangement on the bubble nest construction of Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens Regan, 1910) was investigated. 75 males and 15 females of B. splendens were used for the study. Ten aquariums (33 × 100 × 60 cm) were used and were divided into two sides by a glass layer. Aquariums were aerated and heated by aqua...

A total of 1,426 species of plants had been tested in order to find out a vegetal-derived molluscicide against the vectors of Schistosoma mansoni. Euphorbia splendens is one of the most promising molluscicides. In this article we briefly present the main aspects that have to be considered to use this plant as a molluscicide, which include some agricultural aspects and operational methods for ap...