Seeds from 30 species of grasses and forbs native to Pacific Northwest prairies were tested for physical and physiological dormancy. The physical dormancy was determined by mechanically and chemically scarifying seeds. Physiological dormancy was evaluated with cold stratification before germination. Experiments were analyzed individually with ANOVA analysis, and by seed lots through time using ...

Dormancy in plants involves a temporary suspension of meristem growth, thus insuring bud survival and maintenance of proper shoot system architecture. Dormancy regulation is a complex process involving interactions of various signals through specific and/or overlapping signal transduction pathways. In this review, environmental, physiological, and developmental signals affecting dormancy are di...

Dormancy is a state of metabolic arrest that facilitates the survival of organisms during environmental conditions incompatible with their regular course of life. Many organisms have deep dormant stages to promote an extended life span (increased longevity). In contrast, plants have seed dormancy and seed longevity described as two traits. Seed dormancy is defined as a temporary failure of a vi...

Seed dormancy is a mechanism underlying the inability of viable seeds to germinate under optimal environmental conditions. To achieve rapid and uniform germination, wheat and other cereal crops have been selected against dormancy. As a result, most of the modern commercial cultivars have low level of seed dormancy and are susceptible to preharvest sprouting when wet and moist conditions occur p...

The path to dormancy induction, maintenance, and release is a continuum and has been the topic of thousands of research articles to date. It would be an impossible task and indeed presumptuous of us to imagine that we could review all the research conducted on dormancy in the past century in this article. The multiple and complex nature of the dormancy phenomenon would require not one review bu...

Annual forbs form short-term persistent soil seed banks whereas perennial grasses form mostly transient ones in the central Monte desert. A conceptual framework predicts that annual forb seeds will have primary dormancy, whereas perennial grasses will have low dormancy levels. We assessed whether the dormancy traits of four annual forb species and five perennial grass species can account for th...

• Seed dormancy can affect life history through its effects on germination time. Here, we investigate its influence on life history beyond the timing of germination. • We used the response of Arabidopsis thaliana to chilling at the germination and flowering stages to test the following: how seed dormancy affects germination responses to the environment; whether variation in dormancy affects adu...

The genetic control of dormancy is poorly understood in most plant species, but dormancy is a prominent feature for the potato industry. We used the microtuber system, in which tubers were produced in vitro and stored at 20°C, to perform quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis for dormancy and gibberellic acid (GA3) content in an F1 population consisting of 178 genotypes derived from an intersp...

Clinical cancer dormancy is evident from the detection of circulating tumor cells in the blood and tissue-residing disseminated tumor cells in the bone marrow of cancer survivors who have been clinically disease free. Emerging evidence from clinical and preclinical studies suggests that tumor dormancy is a critical step in the development of both primary cancer and advanced-stage disease. In th...