Main resistances of the plant water transport system are situated in leaves. In contrast to angiosperm leaves, knowledge of conifer needle hydraulics and of the partitioning of resistances within needles is poor. A new technique was developed which enabled flow-meter measurements through needles embedded in paraffin and thus quantification of the specific hydraulic conductivity (K(s)) of the ne...

Plant leaf size varies by more than three orders of magnitude, from a few millimeters to over one meter. Conifer leaves, however, are relatively short and the majority of needles are no longer than 6 cm. The reason for the strong confinement of the trait-space is unknown. We show that sugars produced near the tip of long needles cannot be exported efficiently, because the pressure required to d...

During our studies on the diverse endophytic fungi resident on conifer needles, many species of Cladosporium previously unreported in Korea were encountered. In this paper, we report on two species of Cladosporium from the needles of pine trees (Pinus spp.). Based on analyses of internal transcribed spacer gene sequence, and cultural and micromorphological characteristics, they were identified ...

Nest mounds of wood ants the Formica rufa group are built using conifer needles, small branches, other plant materials and soil. Conifer needles contain several mono sesquiterpenes. Thus, ant nests may act as terpene hotspots in forest soils. Some terpenes show antifungal activity thus cause small-scale heterogeneity fungal biomass. We compared concentrations biomass (ergosterol concentration) ...

Terpenes emitted by conifer trees are generally determined by analysing plant extracts or essential oils, prepared from foliage and cones using steam distillation. The application of these procedures limits experiments to cut plant materials. Recently headspace techniques have been adopted to examine terpene emission by living plants. This paper deals with the application of solid-phase micro-e...

Hybridization of labelled cDNA from various cell types with high-density arrays of expressed sequence tags is a powerful technique for investigating gene expression. Few conifer cDNA libraries have been sequenced. Because of the high level of sequence conservation between Pinus and Picea we have investigated the use of arrays from one genus for studies of gene expression in the other. The parti...

Summary The green leaves of plants are optimised for carbon fixation and the production sugars, which used as central units energy throughout plant. However, there physical limits to this optimisation that remain insufficiently understood. Here, quantitative anatomical analysis combined with mathematical modelling sugar transport rate measurements were determine how effectively sugars exported ...