To estimate the relative contributions of woody and herbaceous vegetation to savanna productivity, we measured the 13C/12C isotopic ratios of leaves from trees, shrubs, grasses and the surface soil carbon pool for 22 savannas in Australia, Brazil and Ghana covering the full savanna spectrum ranging from almost pure grassland to closed woodlands on all three continents. All trees and shrubs samp...

Citation: Cerolini S, Pazzaglia M and Lombardo C (2017) Commentary: Gain in Body Fat Is Associated with Increased Striatal Response to Palatable Food Cues, whereas Body Fat Stability Is Associated with Decreased Striatal Response. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 11:65. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00065 Commentary: Gain in Body Fat Is Associated with Increased Striatal Response to Palatable Food Cues, whereas...

UNLABELLED • PREMISE OF THE STUDY Variation in how seeds are dispersed in grasses is ecologically important, and selection for dispersal mechanisms has produced a great variety of dispersal structures (diaspores). Abscission ("shattering") is necessary in wild grasses, but its elimination by selection on nonshattering mutants was a key component of the domestication syndrome in cereal grasses...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The homologous group of sweet grasses belongs to the Pooideae subfamily, but grass pollen species from other subfamilies can also cause allergy, such as Cynodon dactylon (Chloridoideae) and Phragmites communis (Arundinoideae). C dactylon and P communis have not been included in the sweet grasses homologous group because of their low cross-reactivity with other grasses....

Warm-season grasses, also called C4, are the predominant forages for ruminant production in Florida. The C4 grasses grow well under high temperatures and generally cultivated between 25 N and 25 S of the equator. The C4 grasses are more efficient in fixing carbon dioxide than other grasses; however, they have a specialized thick-walled parenchyma bundle sheath around each vascular bundle, and m...

Plant toxins are the chemical defenses of plants against herbivory. Grasses have relatively few intrinsic toxins, relying more on growth habit to survive defoliation and endophytic fungal toxins as chemical defenses. Forage grasses that contain intrinsic toxins include Phalaris spp. (tryptamine and carboline alkaloids), sorghums (cyanogenic glycosides), and tropical grasses containing oxalates ...

'C4 photosynthesis' refers to a suite of traits that increase photosynthesis in high light and high temperature environments. Most C4 plants are grasses, which dominate tropical and subtropical grasslands and savannas but are conspicuously absent from cold growing season climates. Physiological attributes of C4 photosynthesis have been invoked to explain C4 grass biogeography; however, the path...

Sugars are sweet and palatable. Sweetness is detected by the neural system, whereas palatability may be detected within the neural and chemical systems in the brain. Sweetness is discriminated from other tastes by different receptor sites on taste bud cells, a different subset of fibers in the taste nerves, and different projection zones in the brain. The benzodiazepine and opioid systems are r...

We show that 18O evaporative enrichment of bulk leaf water in grass species can be significantly more enriched than predicted by the Craig-Gordon model, with C4 grasses considerably more enriched than C3 grasses. Our results suggest that the unanticipated 18O leaf water enrichment of grasses is attributable to the progressive evaporative enrichment along parallel veins (a function of both leaf ...