A ll of the hydrogen and most of the helium in the universe emerged 13.8 billion years ago from the Big Bang. The remainder of the chemical elements, except for a tiny amount of lithium, were forged in stellar interiors, supernova explosions, and neutron-star mergers. Elements up to and including iron are made in the hot cores of short-lived massive stars. There, nuclear fusion creates ever-hea...

The identification of noun groups in text is a well researched task and serves as a pre-step for other natural language processing tasks, such as the extraction of keyphrases or technical terms. We present a first version of a noun group chunker that, given an unannotated text corpus, adapts itself to the domain at hand in an unsupervised way. Our approach is inspired by findings from cognitive...

The seeds of the wild Prunus armeniaca L. (wild Apricot) from the Garhwal Region of Uttarakhand (India) was analysed for its proximate compositions and the physico-chemical characteristics of the oil. The elements present in seed oil were also determined which reflected that apricot is rich in Phosphorous, Calcium, Magnesium, Iron and Copper which makes it suitable for edible and commercial oil...

Laccase (LAC) is the key enzyme responsible for lignin biosynthesis. Here, 57 PgLACs from pomegranate were identified and distributed on eight chromosomes one unplaced scaffold. They divided into six groups containing three typical Cu-oxidase domains. Totally, 51 cis-acting elements in promoter region of are involved response to ABA, GA, light, stress, etc., indicating diverse functions PgLACs....

To mitigate the effects of heat and drought stress, a better understanding of the genetic control of physiological responses to these environmental conditions is needed. To this end, we evaluated an upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) mapping population under water-limited and well-watered conditions in a hot, arid environment. The elemental concentrations (ionome) of seed samples from the po...

Phytostabilization aims to immobilize soil contaminants using higher plants. The accumulation of trace elements in Populus alba leaves was monitored for 12 years after a mine spill. Concentrations of As and Pb significantly decreased, while concentrations of Cd and Zn did not significantly over time. Soil concentrations extracted by CaCl2 were measured by ICP-OES and results of As and Pb were b...

Imprinted gene expression occurs during seed development in plants and is associated with differential DNA methylation of parental alleles, particularly at proximal transposable elements (TEs). Imprinting variability could contribute to observed parent-of-origin effects on seed development. We investigated intraspecific variation in imprinting, coupled with analysis of DNA methylation and small...

Chimeric constructs containing the promoter and upstream sequences of Ha hsp17.6 G1, a small heat shock protein gene, reproduced in transgenic tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) its unique seed-specific expression patterns previously reported in sunflower. These constructs did not respond to heat shock, but were expressed without exogenous stress during late zygotic embryogenesis coincident with seed ...

The antagonistic crosstalk between gibberellic acid (GA) and abscisic acid (ABA) plays a pivotal role in the modulation of seed germination. However, the molecular mechanism of such phytohormone interaction remains largely elusive. Here we show that three Arabidopsis NUCLEAR FACTOR-Y C (NF-YC) homologues NF-YC3, NF-YC4 and NF-YC9 redundantly modulate GA- and ABA-mediated seed germination. These...