BACKGROUND The cereal crops domesticated from grasses provide a large percentage of the calories consumed by humans. Domestication and breeding in individual cereals has historically occurred in isolation, although this is rapidly changing with comparative genomics of the sequenced or soon-to-be sequenced genomes of rice, sorghum, maize and Brachypodium. Genetic information transferred through ...

Despite their minute biomass, microbial symbionts of plants potentially alter herbivory, diversity and community structure. Infection of grasses by asexual endophytic fungi often decreases herbivore loads and alters arthropod diversity. However, most studies to date have involved agronomic grasses and often consider only infection status (infected vs. uninfected), without explicitly measuring e...

Grasslands cover more than 20% of the Earth's terrestrial surface, and their rise to dominance is one of the most dramatic events of biome evolution in Earth history. Grasses possess two main photosynthetic pathways: the C(3) pathway that is typical of most plants and a specialized C(4) pathway that minimizes photorespiration and thus increases photosynthetic performance in high-temperature and...

Grasses have been considered to primarily employ tolerance in lieu of defense in mitigating damage caused by herbivory. Yet a number of mechanisms have been identified in grasses, which may deter feeding by grazers. These include enhanced silicon uptake, hosting of toxin-producing endophytic fungi and induction of secondary metabolites. While these mechanisms have been individually studied, the...

Satyrinae butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) and grasses (Poaceae) are very diverse and distributed worldwide. Most Satyrinae use grasses as host plants, but the temporal scale of this tight association is not known. Here, we present a phylogenetic study of Satyrinae butterflies and related groups, based on 5.1 kilobases from six gene regions and 238 morphological characters for all major l...

The highly photosynthetic-efficient C4 grasses, such as switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), Miscanthus (Miscanthusxgiganteus), sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) and maize (Zea mays), are expected to provide abundant and sustainable resources of lignocellulosic biomass for the production of biofuels. A deeper understanding of the synthesis, deposition and hydrolysis of the distinctive cell walls of grasses ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Previous studies have shown that silica in grass leaves defends them against small herbivores, which avoid high-silica grasses and digest them less efficiently. This study tested the idea that silica can reduce digestibility by preventing the mechanical breakdown of chlorenchyma cells. METHODS Both the percentage of total chlorophyll liberated from high- and low-silica gra...

Establishment of perennial grass seedlings is critical for repairing rangeland ecosystems in the Western United States. Mineral N in the soil may be one of the controlling factors for seedling establishment and may improve the competitive ability of perennial grasses compared to the annual grass, cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.). A greenhouse experiment was conducted to investigate the effects o...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Polyploidy is common in the grasses and low-copy nuclear loci are needed to further our understanding of phylogenetic relationships. METHODS AND RESULTS Genetic and genomic resources were combined to identify loci known to influence plant and inflorescence architecture. Degenerate primers were designed and tested to amplify regions of 11 nuclear-encoded loci across the pa...