Rational: It is no exaggeration to say that Japanese allergic people has increased according to the increase of Japanese Cedar (JC) pollinosis since the first case report, 1964. In Japan allergenic conifer airborne pollen counts have been increasing with a concomitant change in the start of pollination as a result of climate change during about 30 years. We also investigated as if Fagaceae poll...

Fagaceae is one of the largest and economically important taxa within Fagales. Considering the incongruence among inferences from plastid and nuclear genes in the previous Fagaceae phylogeny studies, we assess the performance of plastid phylogenomics in this complex family. We sequenced and assembled four complete plastid genomes (Fagus engleriana, Quercus spinosa, Quercus aquifolioides, and Qu...

Functional gene transfer from the plastid to the nucleus is rare among land plants despite evidence that DNA transfer to the nucleus is relatively frequent. During the course of sequencing plastid genomes from representative species from three rosid genera (Castanea, Prunus, Theobroma) and ongoing projects focusing on the Fagaceae and Passifloraceae, we identified putative losses of rpl22 in th...

Variation in photosynthetic-nitrogen use efficiency (PNUE) is generally affected by several factors such as leaf nitrogen allocation and leaf diffusional conductances to CO2, although it is still unclear which factors significantly affect PNUE in tropical montane rain forest trees. In this study, comparison of PNUE, photosynthetic capacity, leaf nitrogen allocation, and diffusional conductances...

The internal transcribed spacer (ITS) of ribosomal DNA has been used to confirm taxonomic classifications and define phylogenies in several plant species following sequencing or polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) techniques. In this study, co-dominant ITS PCR-RFLP molecular markers were produced in 30 Fagaceae individuals belonging to the Castanea, Fag...

Chemotaxonomic metabolite profiling of 62 indigenous Korean plant species was performed by ultrahigh performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC)-linear trap quadrupole-ion trap (LTQ-IT) mass spectrometry/mass spectrometry (MS/MS) combined with multivariate statistical analysis. In partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), the 62 species clustered depending on their phylogenetic family...

Phylogenetic relationships were examined within the "higher" Hamamelididae using 21 species representing eight families and related outgroups. Chloroplast DNA sequences encoding the matK gene (/1 kilobase) provided 258 informative nucleotide sites. Phylogenetic analysis of this variation produced one most parsimonious tree supporting three monophyletic groups. In this tree, Nothofagus was basal...

The aphid genus Parathoracaphis Takahashi, 1958 is reviewed. Parathoracaphis spinapilosasp. n., found on Quercus sp. and on an unidentified species of Fagaceae in China is described and illustrated. A generic diagnosis and a key to Parathoracaphis species are presented.