Cotton, the king of natural fibres is mainly cultivated for its lint which is the most sought after textile fibre till date due to its inherent ecofriendly and comfort characteristics. It is also one of the important cash crops of many of the Afro-Asian countries like India, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Tanzania, etc. and plays a major role in their economic development. However, of late, co...

When computing on massive graphs, it is not tractable to iterate over the full graph. Local graph methods aim to analyze properties in a neighborhood of a seed vertex. Graph partitioning is an example of a problem that has a local analog. It attempts to find a sparse cut of a specific volume near a seed vertex. Previous work attempts to approximate the optimal partition through standard, PageRa...

Tamarind (Tamarindus indica L) seed polysaccharide (TSP) is of great important due to its various biological activities. The present investigation was carried out to compare extraction yield, morphological characteristics, average molecular weights and antioxidant activities of TSP from gammaand electron beam (EB)-irradiated tamarind kernel powder. The tamarind kernel powder was irradiated with...

Long-distance dispersal (LDD) events, although rare for most plant species, can strongly influence population and community dynamics. Animals function as a key biotic vector of seeds and thus, a mechanistic and quantitative understanding of how individual animal behaviors scale to dispersal patterns at different spatial scales is a question of critical importance from both basic and applied per...

The embryo and endosperm are the products of double fertilization and comprise the clonally distinct products of angiosperm seed development. Recessive mutations in the maize gene discolored1 (dsc1) condition inviable seed that are defective in both embryo and endosperm development. Here, detailed phenotypic analyses illustrate that discolored mutant kernels are able to establish, but fail to m...

Genome information from model species such as rice can assist in the cloning of genes in a complex genome, such as maize. Here, we identified a maize ortholog of rice GS5 that contributes to kernel development in maize. The genome-wide association analysis of the expression levels of ZmGS5, and 15 of its 26 paralogs, identified a trans-regulator on chromosome 7, which was a BAK1-like gene. This...

A laboratory experiment was conducted to investigate the efficacy of different plant derivatives against the development of the cowpea weevil, Callosobruchus maculatus (F) (Coleoptera: Bruchidae) fed on cowpea, Vigna unguiculata (W) seeds. The leaf extracts of romatic plants, Murraya koenigii and Azadirachta indica (A.Juss) were evaluated for their growth, adult mortality and oviposition inhibi...

The study was conducted to determine the specific chemical constituents of cattle urine and indigenous plant extracts. Chemical analysis revealed that the specific chemical composition i.e., chloride, sulphate, nitrite and phosphorus pentaoxide contents of fresh and fermented cattle urine were 1556, 364, 2.0, 26.8 and 4514, 252, 22.4, 7.49 mg l-1, respectively. The proximate chemical compositio...

THE postfertilization development of the ovary of the hazel flower results in the formation from the outer integument of the ovule of a thin fibrous seed coat closely adherent to the embryo and from the ovary wall of a hard, lignified pericarp which is quite free from the seed coat at the time when the fruit is ripe. The work recorded in this paper was done on the pericarp of the hazel fruit. T...