THE ABUNDANCE and variety of man's food depend upon his control over environment. For primitive tribes this meant success in hunting and fishing, and discovery and discriminating use of roots, leaves, fruit, and seeds of wild plants. Later, as animals were domesticated and agriculture got under way, control over environment came to mean good management of crops and flocks. Today for a large par...

Plant biotechnology has emerged as a powerful tool of crop improvement and has aroused a great deal of interest in many countries because of its application to agriculture and horticulture. We report here the application of a number of in vitro plant breeding techniques such as micropropagation, in vitro flowering, in vitro pollination and fertilisation, anther culture, somatic embryogenesis, a...

The loss of genetic diversity of thousands of plants and crops has been well documented at least since the 1970s, and has been understood as a result of epistemological and political economic conditions of the Green Revolution. The political economic arrangement of the Green Revolution, alongside a post-war focus on economies of scale and export-oriented growth, replace high-yield single variet...

TOPIC 1 when viewing the activities of forest managers. It was pointed out that foresters engaged in seed procurenlent What can we achieve through tree hp-ovemaent? and seedling distribution not in'requently jeopardize (Papers by J . W . Wright and Robert E. Farmer.) Distheir own programs by ignoring common knowledge recussion Leader, Hans Nienstaedt, North Central Forest garding the adaptation...

The introduction of alien species, which are also called exotic or non-native species, can cause a decrease in biotic similarity among areas when different species are introduced to each area and remain localized, a process called biotic differentiation (Olden & Poff, 2003; Qian et al., 2008). However, over time, alien species often spread widely and cause an increase in biotic similarity among...

The increasing release of untreated fish farming effluents into water courses that flow to the Pantanal wetlands in Mato Grosso (Brazil) may drive this ecosystem to eutrophication. Therefore, the growth of Azolla caroliniana Willd. and Salvinia auriculata Aubl. in fish farming effluent and their effect on its quality were evaluated for 48 days in a greenhouse. The results were compared to those...

The development of plant biotechnologies has been very rapid in recent times, especially in the developed countries. The technologies have created a new branch of biotechnology known as molecular farming, where plants are engineered to produce pharmaceutical and technical proteins in large quantities. An evaluation of the status of plant biotechnology development in Africa revealed that majorit...

Detailed studies of the long-term development of plant use strategies indicate that plant subsistence patterns have noticeably changed since the Upper Paleolithic, when humans underwent a transitional process from foraging to agriculture. This transition was best recorded in west Asia; however, information about how plant subsistence changed during this transition remains limited in China. This...

The banana is the world's largest herbaceous flowering plant. Commercial bananas are sterile and are propagated by planting root stock from donor plants (the dark specks in the center of a banana are undeveloped ovules, the precursors to seeds).