Genome sequencing of various organisms allow global analysis of gene expression, providing numerous clues on the biological function and involvement in the biological processes studied. Proteomics is a branch of molecular biology and biotechnology that has undergone considerable development in the post-genomic era. Despite the recent significant advancements in proteomics techniques, still ther...

Current research efforts to understand the relative invasibility of different plant communities have mostly ignored tropical forests. Only a few studies have treated invasive species in tropical forests, and recent worldwide analyses have not provided clear predictions concerning the relative invasibility of tropical forests. In this review, the extent to which exotic species have invaded tropi...

Fungal endophytes are found in asymptomatic photosynthetic tissues of all major lineages of land plants. The ubiquity of these cryptic symbionts is clear, but the scale of their diversity, host range, and geographic distributions are unknown. To explore the putative hyperdiversity of tropical leaf endophytes, we compared endophyte communities along a broad latitudinal gradient from the Canadian...

Ecological perturbations can either be necessary for maintaining tropical forest diversity or responsible for its decline, depending on the scale, nature, and frequency of the disturbance. Anthropogenic disturbances such as logging and subsistence agriculture may promote the establishment of nonnative, invasive plant species, potentially affecting forest structure and diversity even long after ...

The flora of Tropical Asia is among the richest in the world, yet the actual diversity is estimated to be much higher than previously reported. Myanmar and Thailand are adjacent countries that together occupy more than the half the area of continental Tropical Asia. This geographic area is diverse ecologically, ranging from cool-temperate to tropical climates, and includes from coast, rainfores...

background: investigation on the natural radionuclides 238u, 232th, 40k and natural fallout radionuclide 210po in the prominent plants species of western ghats tropical forest near kotagiri have been carried out as a part of baseline background radiation studies in the forest environment. materials and methods: the prominent plants species of the region evodia roxburghiana and eleaocarpus oblan...

Most achlorophyllous mycoheterotrophic (MH) plants obtain carbon (C) from mycorrhizal networks and indirectly exploit nearby autotrophic plants. We compared overlooked tropical rainforest MH plants associating with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) to well-reported temperate MH plants associating with ectomycorrhizal basidiomycetes. We investigated (13)C and (15)N abundances of MH plants, gree...

Nitrogen (N) availability influences the productivity and distribution of plants in tropical montane forests. Strategies to acquire soil N, such as direct uptake of organic compounds or associations with root symbionts to enhance N acquisition in exchange for carbon (C), may facilitate plant species coexistence and ecosystem N retention. Alternatively, rapid microbial turnover of soil N forms i...

BACKGROUND The lag time of an invasion is the delay between arrival of an introduced species and its successful spread in a new area. To date, most estimates of lag times for plants have been indirect or anecdotal, and these estimates suggest that plant invasions are often characterized by lag times of 50 years or more. No general estimates are available of lag times for tropical plant invasion...

Novotny et al. (Reports, 25 August 2006, p. 1115) argued that higher herbivore diversity in tropical forests results from greater phylogenetic diversity of host plants, not from higher host specificity. However, if host specificity is related to host abundance, differences in relative host abundance between tropical and temperate regions may limit any general conclusion that herbivore diversity...