partitioning of photoassimilates between the sinks is one of the most important physiological processes related to the yield of crops which are affected by drought stress. therefore, the effect of drought stress in flowering and grain filling stages, on the percentage partitioning of photoassimilates among different organs was studied in 14 rapeseed cultivars in a split plot experiment based on...

The geometry of leaf margins is an important shape characteristic that distinguishes among different leaf phenotypes. Current definitions of leaf shape are qualitative and do not allow quantification of differences in shape between phenotypes. This is especially true for leaves with some non-trivial three-dimensional (3D) configurations. Here we present a novel geometrical method novel geometri...

Leaf senescence constitutes the last stage of leaf development in plants and proceeds through a highly regulated program in order to redistribution of microand macro-nutrients from the senescing leaves to the developing/growing plant organs. Initiation and progression of leaf senescence is accompanied by massive sequential alterations at various levels of leaf biology including leaf morphology ...

Coordination of water movement among plant organs is important for understanding plant water use strategies. The hydraulic segmentation hypothesis (HSH) proposes that hydraulic conductance in shorter lived, 'expendable' organs such as leaves and longer lived, more 'expensive' organs such as stems may be decoupled, with resistance in leaves acting as a bottleneck or 'safety valve'. We tested the...

To understand better the mechanisms that lead to dorsoventrality in the lateral organs of plants, mutants at the phantastica (phan) locus of Antirrhinum majus have been identified and characterised. The leaves, bracts and petal lobes of phan mutants show varying degrees of reduction in dorsal tissues, indicating that phan is required for establishing dorsal cell identity. Each phan mutant produ...

In Fagus, full-mast seeding years are invariably followed by at least one non-mast year. Both flower and leaf primordia develop during the summer within the same winter buds. Flower bud initiation occurs when the N content of developing seeds is increasing rapidly. We hypothesized that competition for nitrogen (N) between developing seeds and buds limits flower primordium formation in mast year...

A fate map has been constructed for the shoot apical region of the embryo of the dicotyledonous plant Arabidopsis thaliana using spontaneously arising clonal albino sectors caused by the chloroplast mutator 1-2 mutation. Chimeric seedlings exhibiting albino sectors shared between the cotyledons and first true leaves revealed patterns of organ inclusion and exclusion. Frequencies of clone sharin...

In spite of the different morphologies of sepals, petals, stamens, and carpels, all these floral organs are believed to be modified versions of a ground-state organ similar to the leaf. Modifications of the ground-state developmental programme are orchestrated by different combinations of MADS-domain transcription factors encoded by floral organ identity genes. In recent years, much has been re...