This work evaluated the effect of seed size and morphology on the development and biomass of durum wheat seedlings. Three different seed-grading sizes selected by sieving were used in glasshouse experiments, and a set of three developmental and 23 biomass-related indices were measured on eight genotypes, at two moisture levels. The influence of seed size on seedling development was studied at h...

The cold shock domain is among the most evolutionarily conserved nucleic acid binding domains from prokaryotes to higher eukaryotes, including plants. Although eukaryotic cold shock domain proteins have been extensively studied as transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulators during various developmental processes, their functional roles in plants remains poorly understood. In this study,...

doi: 10.1111/j.1399-3054.2006.00699.x Through identifying and understanding ecologically important dimensions of plant trait variation we gain insight into why particular trait combinations are favoured and into the implications of trait differences among species. Here, we describe relationships among several poorly understood leaf and stem traits across species from several Australian vegetati...

this study was undertaken to identify morphological changes in young seedlings of 5 iranian almond species (prunus dulcis, p. eburnea, p. eleagnifolia, p. haussknechti, and p. scoparia) under polyethylene glycol-induced drought stress. drought stress caused a significant reduction in plant growth parameters such as fresh and dry weights of plant organs, leaf number, total leaf area, and leaf re...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS When ecologically important plant traits are correlated they may be said to constitute an ecological 'strategy' dimension. Through identifying these dimensions and understanding their inter-relationships we gain insight into why particular trait combinations are favoured over others and into the implications of trait differences among species. Here we investigated relationsh...

Leafcutting ants (Atta and Acromyrmex) sometimes form piles or caches of leaves on foraging trails. Laboratory experiments have shown that leaf caching at the nest entrance by Atta cephalotes and Atta colombica is adaptive because it occurs when a colony’s leaf delivery rate exceeds its leaf-processing rate and serves to increase the probability that a dropped leaf is eventually recovered. We e...

Achillea lanulosa has complex, highly dissected leaves that vary in shape and size along an altitudinal gradient. Plants from a high and an intermediate altitude population were clonally replicated and grown in a controlled environment at warm and cool conditions under bright light. There were genetic differences among populations and among individuals within populations in leaf size and shape....

Understanding the relationship of the size and shape of an organism to the size, shape, and number of its constituent cells is a basic problem in biology; however, numerous studies indicate that the relationship is complex and often nonintuitive. To investigate this problem, we used a system for the inducible expression of genes involved in the G1/S transition of the plant cell cycle and analyz...

Mosses are an understudied group of plants that can potentially confirm or expand principles of plant function described for tracheophytes, from which they diverge strongly in structure. We quantified 35 physiological and morphological traits from cell-, leaf- and canopy-level, for 10 ground-, trunk- and branch-dwelling Hawaiian species. We hypothesized that trait values would reflect the disti...