BACKGROUND In part due to the ease of visual detection of phenotypic changes, anthocyanin pigment production has long been the target of genetic and molecular research in plants. Specific members of the large family of plant myb transcription factors have been found to play critical roles in regulating expression of anthocyanin biosynthetic genes and these genes continue to serve as important t...

BACKGROUND Whole plants or plant cell cultures can serve as low cost bioreactors to produce massive amounts of a specific protein for pharmacological or industrial use. To maximize protein expression, translation of mRNA must be optimized. Many plant viral RNAs harbor extremely efficient translation enhancers. However, few of these different translation elements have been compared side-by-side....

In the preceding papers (7, 8) of this series we presented the effects of certain mineral deficiency on the organic constituents of tobacco plants. Changes in the organic composition were associated with the development of typical symptoms resulting from an abnormal supply of a specific mineral. Mineral deficiency symptoms, in general, appear initially in a localized area and are very mild. The...

An emerging topic in plant biology is whether plants display analogous elements of mammalian programmed cell death during development and defense against pathogen attack. In many plant-pathogen interactions, plant cell death occurs in both susceptible and resistant host responses. For example, specific recognition responses in plants trigger formation of the hypersensitive response and activati...

To test the hypothesis that caspase-like proteases exist and are critically involved in the implementation of programmed cell death (PCD) in plants, a search was undertaken for plant caspases activated during the N gene-mediated hypersensitive response (HR; a form of pathogen-induced PCD in plants) in tobacco plants infected with Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). For detection, characterization, and ...

Harpin from the bean halo-blight pathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv phaseolicola (harpin(Psph)) elicits the hypersensitive response and the accumulation of pathogenesis-related gene transcripts in the nonhost plant tobacco. Here, we report the characterization of a nonproteinaceous binding site for harpin(Psph) in tobacco plasma membranes, which is assumed to mediate the activation of plant defen...

The use of tobacco dates back to the ancient civilizations of the Americas, where it played a central role in religious occasions. The peoples smoked tobacco in cigars and pipes and chewed it with lime, for its pleasurable euphoriant effects. In the 16 th century, Europeans spread the use of tobacco in North America, while the Spanish bring it into Europe. In the 1559, Jean Nicot, the French am...

Plant species exhibit two primary forms of flowering architecture, namely, indeterminate and determinate. Antirrhinum is an indeterminate species in which shoots grow indefinitely and only generate flowers from their periphery. Tobacco is a determinate species in which shoot meristems terminate by converting to a flower. We show that tobacco is responsive to the CENTRORADIALIS (CEN) gene, which...