We sought to gain insight into functions potentially altered by mechanostimulation and investigate the relationship between touch and darkness responses. Microarrays and quantitative RT-PCR were conducted to identify genes and analyze behaviors of calmodulin-like (CML) and xyloglucan endotransglucosylase/hydrolase (XTH) genes. Strikingly, 589 genes had touch-inducible expression; 171 had reduce...

Treatment of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) leaves by extended darkness generates a genetically activated senescence program that culminates in cell death. The transcriptome of leaves subjected to extended darkness was found to contain a variety of reactive oxygen species (ROS)-specific signatures. The levels of transcripts constituting the transcriptome footprints of chloroplasts and cytop...

Patients with congenital achromatopsia and congenital stationary night blindness have been known to show a transient pupillary constriction to darkness. We examined 50 normal subjects and 108 patients with retinal and optic nerve dysfunction to see if any had an initial pupillary constriction to darkness. We used a new infrared television apparatus. Four patients with congenital stationary nigh...

Bidirectional laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV) and fundus photography were applied to investigate the effects of light and darkness on retinal blood flow. Blood flow had increased by an average of 67% after 5 min of darkness. This increase persisted for periods of darkness as long as 80 min (the longest period tested). The magnitude of this elevation, its time course, and its neutralization by t...

In vivo NO(3) (-) reduction in roots and shoots of intact barley (Hordeum vulgare L. var Numar) seedlings was estimated in light and darkness. Seedlings were placed in darkness for 24 hours to make them carbohydrate-deficient. During darkness, the leaves lost 75% of their soluble carbohydrates, whereas the roots lost only 15%. Detached leaves from these plants reduced only 7% of the NO(3) (-) a...

When green hydra were grown in continuous darkness the mean cell size of their symbiotic algae was smaller than when grown in light and numbers of algae per digestive cell were reduced. The former was due to a reduction in size at which the algae divided, and the latter to a loss of synchrony of algal mitosis with that of digestive cells after transfer to darkness. Eventually, algal mitosis reg...