Beginning in the 1980s, concerns about the deleterious effects of synthetic pesticides have driven a significant Southeast Asian research and development effort directed towards alternative pest control strategies, including the use of microbial control agents. Despite this effort, use of microbial control agents has grown slowly in the region. This is the result of an interplay between interna...

Residues of plant protection products can be nowadays found in almost all samples of fruits as even if their application was carried out with respect to standards of Good Agricultural Practice. The intake of these compounds with food of plant origin may result in various disorders and diseases. Since the use of plant protection agents seems unavoidable, it is necessary to treat contaminated foo...

The growing public concern about groundwater contamination, pesticide residues, soil erosion, and wildlife habitat runs parallel to “an emerging interest by many farmers for a more costeffective and environmentally benign agriculture” (USDA, 1990). But only a small number of farmers are using alternative farming systems (Board of Agriculture, 1989). The cause of the limited adoption of sustaina...

Abscission is a developmental process that enables plants to shed unwanted organs. In Arabidopsis, the floral organ abscission is regulated by a signaling pathway consisting of the peptide ligand IDA, the receptor-like kinases (RLKs) HAE and HSL2, and a downstream MAP kinase (MAPK) cascade. However, little is known about the molecular link between ligand-receptor pairs and intracellular signali...

The Yes-associated protein (YAP) transcriptional coactivator is a key regulator of organ size and a candidate human oncogene inhibited by the Hippo tumor suppressor pathway. The TEAD family of transcription factors binds directly to and mediates YAP-induced gene expression. Here we report the three-dimensional structure of the YAP (residues 50-171)-TEAD1 (residues 194-411) complex, in which YAP...

© 2012 Zanella et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. An Overview About Recent Advances in Sample Preparation Techniques for Pesticide Res...