in order to locate qtls controlling some agronomic traits associated to drought stress and to determine their relationships with grain yield, an experiment was conducted at the research farm, college of agriculture, university of zabol in 2011. the experiment was arranged in two complete block designs with 3 replications. 72 barley double haploid lines including their parents (steptoe×morex) we...

AWN is a process algebra developed for modelling and analysing protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) and Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) [2, §4]. AWN models comprise five distinct layers: sequential processes, local parallel compositions, nodes, partial networks, and complete networks. This development mechanises the original operational semantics of AWN and introduces a variant ‘open’ op...

A six-year-old intact female Lagotto Romagnolo was referred with a two-day history of purulent vulvar discharge associated with fever, lethargy, polyuria, polydipsia and signs of abdominal pain. Abdominal ultrasound revealed a grass awn foreign body in the vaginal fornix. Culture swabs obtained from the vagina revealed the presence of Staphylococcus epidermidis as the preponderant organism. Ova...

Ratcheting surfaces are a common motif in nature and appear in plant awns and grasses. They are known to proffer selective advantages for seed dispersion and burial. In two simple model experiments, we show that these anisotropically toothed surfaces naturally serve as motion rectifiers and generically move in a unidirectional manner, when subjected to temporally and spatially symmetric excitat...

Elymus sibiricus (siberian wildrye) is a perennial, cool-season, self-pollinating, and allotetraploid grass. As an economically important species, it has been widely grown and used for pasture and hay in northern China. Because of serious seed shattering (SS), however, E. sibiricus is difficult to grow for commercial seed production. To better understand the underlying mechanism of SS, we inves...

The sessile nature of plants demands the development of seed-dispersal mechanisms to establish new growing loci. Dispersal strategies of many species involve drying of the dispersal unit, which induces directed contraction and movement based on changing environmental humidity. The majority of researched hygroscopic dispersal mechanisms are based on a bilayered structure. Here, we investigate th...

Small RNAs (sRNA) of 15-30 nucleotides regulate various processes in eukaryotes. Regulatory sRNAs are produced through the RNA interference (RNAi) pathway from double stranded RNA (dsRNA). Dicer or dicer-like enzyme processes the dsRNAs into 15-30 bp dsRNAs, which in turn bind to the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC) to regulate gene expression. We previously cloned sRNAs from barley. In thi...

Round seeds are desirable for food-type soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.], and the genetic control of seed geometry is of scientific interest. The aim of this research was to: (1) compare the seed shape variation of 165 soybean cultivars and to quantify the characteristics of the cultivars, and, (2) to evaluate the seed shape of the parental F1 and F2 populations derived from Tamahomare × Peking...

Seed germination strongly affects plant population growth and persistence, and it can be dramatically influenced by phylogeny, seed traits, and ecological factors. In this study, we examined the relationships among seed mass, seed shape, and germination percentage (GP), and assessed the extent to which phylogeny, seed traits (seed mass, shape, and color) and ecological factors (ecotype, life fo...