Plants are not capable of running away from their enemies, i.e., the herbivores that may eat them. However, under certain circumstances, plants can rely on the natural enemies of insect herbivores for protection. These natural enemies include other insects that are predators and parasitoids. To help protect plants from damage caused by insect herbivores, practical methods have been developed an...

Agriculture is one of the most momentous inventions of humanity. It generated a surplus of food as a consequence of which a sizable fraction of societies were able to engage in economic activities other than agriculture. Thus, agriculture is considered to have been a prerequisite for the development of many civilizations throughout the world. It originated independently and at similar times (ar...

Research made possible through the use of the wealth of genomic information and genetic resources available for model plant species such as Arabidopsis thaliana has led to a substantial increase in our knowledge about how plants respond to stressful environmental conditions. This leap in understanding provides the basis for many new strategies for optimization of stress tolerance in crop plants...

Plants are sessile organisms therefore, cannot avoid adverse environmental conditions (such as soil salinity, drought, heat, cold, flooding and heavy metal contamination). These stress factors are a menace for plants, prevent them from reaching their full genetic potential and limit crop productivity worldwide. Soil contamination with heavy metals has become a world wide problem leading to loss...

The UK Crop Plant Bioinformatics Network (UK CropNet) was established in 1996 in order to harness the extensive work in genome mapping in crop plants in the UK. Since this date we have published five databases from our central UK CropNet WWW site (http://synteny.nott.ac.uk/) with a further three to follow shortly. Our resource facilitates the identification and manipulation of agronomically imp...

Crop-wild hybridization may produce offspring with lower fitness than their wild parents due to deleterious crop traits and outbreeding depression. Over time, however, selection for improved fitness could lead to greater invasiveness of hybrid taxa. To examine evolutionary change in crop-wild hybrids, we established four wild (Raphanus raphanistrum) and four hybrid radish populations (R. raphan...

Crop-weed hybridization can potentially influence the evolutionary ecology of wild populations. Many crops are known to hybridize with wild relatives, but few studies have looked at the long-term persistence of crop genes in the wild. This study investigated one factor in the hybridization process in radish: differential pollinator visitation to wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum) vs. crop-wild...

The domestication and improvement of crop plants have long fascinated evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and anthropologists. In recent years, the development of increasingly powerful molecular and statistical tools has reinvigorated this now fast-paced field of research. In this paper, we provide an overview of how such tools have been applied to the study of crop evolution. We also highlig...

As sessile organisms, plants are inevitably exposed to one or a combination of stress factors every now and then throughout their growth and development. Stress responses vary considerably even in the same plant species; stress-susceptible genotypes are at one extreme, and stress-tolerant ones are at the other. Elucidation of the stress responses of crop plants is of extreme relevance, consider...

Nitrogen is most often the limiting nutrient for crop production, since only a fraction of atmospheric nitrogen is made available to the plants through biological nitrogen fixation (BNF). Extending the BNF ability to non-legumes would be a useful technology for increased crop yields among resource-poor farmers. The idea that genetic manipulation techniques might be used to engineer crop plants ...