Ipomoea (morning glory) is the largest genus in the family Convolvulaceae. Cultivation of morning glory plants began in the late Edo period in Japan, and this horticultural success resulted in thousands of plants with varying floral displays. In addition to the different flower morphologies, leaf shape is highly variable within this family making it an ideal group in which to study leaf develop...

Leaf shape is one of the most variable plant traits. Previous work has provided much indirect evidence that leaf-shape variation is adaptive and that leaf shape influences thermoregulation, water balance, and resistance to natural enemies. Nevertheless, there is little direct evidence that leaf shape actually affects plant fitness. In this study, we first demonstrate that populations of the ivy...

Clines in phenotypic traits with an underlying genetic basis potentially implicate natural selection. However, neutral evolutionary processes such as random colonization, spatially restricted gene flow, and genetic drift could also result in similar spatial patterns, especially for single-locus traits because of their susceptibility to stochastic events. One way to distinguish between adaptive ...

Leaf expansion in the fast-growing tree, Populus x euramericana was stimulated by elevated [CO(2)] in a closed-canopy forest plantation, exposed using a free air CO(2) enrichment technique enabling long-term experimentation in field conditions. The effects of elevated [CO(2)] over time were characterized and related to the leaf plastochron index (LPI), and showed that leaf expansion was stimula...

____________________________________________________________________ Biometric identification is a pattern recognition based classification system that recognizes an individual by determining its authenticity using a specific physiological or behavioural characteristic (biometric). In contrast to number of commercially available biometric systems for human recognition in the market today, there...

Lateral penumbra of multileaf collimator plays an important role in radiotherapy treatment planning. Growing evidence has revealed that, for a single-focused multileaf collimator, lateral penumbra width is leaf position dependent and largely attributed to the leaf end shape. In our study, an analytical method for leaf end induced lateral penumbra modelling is formulated using Tangent Secant The...

A new species from Iran is described and illustrated here as Kickxia iranica (Plantaginaceae). Kickxia iranica is morphologically similar to K. commutata, a species native to Mediterranean region, however it can be distinguished from the latter by leaf shape, color of corolla, habit, stem branching and length of leaf, petiole, pedicel and corolla. Notes on its distribution, ecology and phenolog...

Leaves show a wide range of shapes that results from the combinatory variations of two main parameters: the relative duration of the morphogenetic phase and the pattern of dissection of the leaf margin. To further understand the mechanisms controlling leaf shape, we have studied the interactions between several loci leading to increased dissection of the Arabidopsis leaf margins. Thus, we have ...