Stipa robusta (= Stipa vaseyi) is a perennial grass found in certain areas of the southwestern United States. It is commonly known as sleepygrass, as horses that ingest this grass may become profoundly somnolent or stuporous for periods of time lasting up to several days. In an attempt to determine the active principle(s), fractionation of a methanolic extract of sleepygrass infected with an Ac...

The maturity of green coffee beans is the most influential determinant of the quality and flavor of the resultant coffee beverage. However, the chemical compounds that can be used to discriminate the maturity of the beans remain uncharacterized. We herein analyzed four distinct stages of maturity (immature, semi-mature, mature and overripe) of nine different varieties of green Coffea arabica be...

The six species of the soft-bodied elaterid genus Selasia Laporte (Agrypninae: Drilini) from the Palaearctic Region are reviewed: S. arabica Geisthardt, 2003 (Yemen, Oman, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), S. atriventris Pic, 1914 (India, Nepal), S. boruckae Kundrata, 2012 (Nepal), S. homhilia Geisthardt, 2003 (Yemen: Socotra), S. merkli Kundrata, 2012 (Pakistan), and S. socotrana Kundrata, 2012 (Y...

Plants depend upon both genetic differences and phenotypic plasticity to cope with environmental variation over different timescales. The spatial variation in foliar δ(13)C levels along a moisture gradient represents an overlay of genetic and plastic responses. We hypothesized that such a spatial variation would be more obvious than the variation arising purely from a plastic response to moistu...

An understanding of the factors controlling plant community composition will allow improved prediction of the responses of plant communities to natural and anthropogenic environmental change. Using monitoring data from 1980 to 2009, we quantified the changes in community composition in Leymus chinensis and Stipa grandis dominated grasslands in Inner Mongolia under long-term grazing-exclusion an...

Polyploidization constitutes a common mode of evolution in flowering plants. This event provides the raw material for the divergence of function in homeologous genes, leading to phenotypic novelty that can contribute to the success of polyploids in nature or their selection for use in agriculture. Mounting evidence underlined the existence of homeologous expression biases in polyploid genomes; ...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Stipa breviflora (Poaceae) is one of the dominant species of the desert steppe in the eastern Eurasian grasslands. Simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were developed for use in genetic diversity studies of this species. METHODS AND RESULTS A total of 1954 potentially polymorphic loci were obtained by comparing transcriptome data of eight different S. breviflora individua...