BACKGROUND Aluminum (Al) toxicity is a major worldwide constraint to crop productivity on acidic soils. Al becomes soluble at low pH, inhibiting root growth and severely reducing yields. Maize is an important staple food and commodity crop in acidic soil regions, especially in South America and Africa where these soils are very common. Al exclusion and intracellular tolerance have been suggeste...

A maize plant (Zea mays) planted in a test tube was found to inhibit the growth of the soil-borne plant pathogen, Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. melongenae. The antifungal compounds, 6-methoxybenzoxazolinone and 6,7-dimethoxybenzoxazolinone, were isolated from an ethanol extract of Zea mays roots, and (6R)-7,8-dihydro-3-oxo-alpha-ionone and (6R,9R)-7,8-dihydro-3-oxo-alpha-ionol were isolated from th...

ISHER (1918) provided a framework for the characterization of genotypic variance whereby he partitioned it into three components: ( 1 ) a portion associated with the average effects of genes, (2) a portion associated with dominance effects (allelic interactions) of genes, and (3) a portion associated with epistatic effects (nonallelic interactions) of genes. A logical method for the further sub...

In this study, we examined the relationship between the accumulation of NaHSeO3, the plant hormone (IAA), and some nutrient elements (K(+), Na(+), Ca(2+)) in the tissues of the roots, mesocotyls and leaves of Zea mays L. plants. Our experiments were carried out with eight- to nine-day old maize plants (Zea mays L. var K33xF2) grown on Hoagland's medium containing the standard macro- and microel...

Maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) is genetically diverse, yet it is also morphologically distinct from its wild relatives. These two observations are somewhat contradictory: the first observation is consistent with a large historical population size for maize, but the latter observation is consistent with strong, diversity-limiting selection during maize domestication. In this study, we sampled sequen...

BACKGROUND Artificial selection results in phenotypic evolution. Maize (Zea mays L. ssp. mays) was domesticated from its wild progenitor teosinte (Zea mays subspecies parviglumis) through a single domestication event in southern Mexico between 6000 and 9000 years ago. This domestication event resulted in the original maize landrace varieties. The landraces provided the genetic material for mode...

Nucleotide diversity in the terminal ear1 (te1) gene, a regulatory locus hypothesized to be involved in the morphological evolution of maize (Zea mays ssp. mays), was investigated for evidence of past selection. Nucleotide polymorphism in a 1.4-kb region of te1 was analyzed for a sample of 26 sequences isolated from 12 maize lines, five populations of the maize progenitor, Z. mays ssp. parviglu...

Thirty yellow inbred lines of normal maize were evaluated for thirteen parameters at the experimental field of Hajee Mohammad Danesh Science and Technology University during 2010-11 to study the genetic divergence using multivariate analysis. The thirty inbreds fell into six distinct clusters. The intra-cluster distances in all the six clusters were more or less low, indicating that the genotyp...

In this research, leaf area prediction model was developed for some leaf-used maize (Zea mays L.) cultivars namely Coluna, Luce, Maveric, Ranchero, TTM-813, Zamora and RX-788 grown in Black Sea region of Turkey. Lamina width, length and leaf area were measured without destroying the leaf to develop the models. The actual leaf areas of the plants were measured by PLACOM Digital Planimeter and mu...

Siderophore facilitates iron availability in soil, but its assistance in iron transportation to different plant parts is not reported till date. Therefore, it is worthwhile to study the effect of siderophore produced by Pseudomonas for iron acquisition in the presence and absence of iron. To study these effects, two siderophore-producing Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains RSP5 and RSP8 were selecte...