Cotton, Gossypium hirsutum L., is a plant fibre of significant economic importance, with seeds providing an additional source of protein in human and animal nutrition. Flavonoids play a vital role in maintaining plant health and function and much research has investigated the role of flavonoids in plant defence and plant vigour and the influence these have on cotton production. As part of ongoi...

Dry seeds of four cotton varieties were irradiated with 0, 10, 15, 20 and 25 kR doses of gamma irradiation from Co source of gamma irradiation in 2012 at Nuclear Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA), 60 Tarnab, Peshawar, Pakistan. Three highly potential cotton varieties i.e. Gomal-93, Bt-131 and Bt-CIM-602 with irradiation of 15, 20 and 25 kR, respectively selected for the second year (May...

Farm records were used to study the temporal and spatial distribution of bollworm, Helicoverpa zea (Boddie), tobacco budworm, Heliothis virescens (F.), (collectively heliothines) and tarnished plant bug, Lygus lineolaris (Palisot de Beauvois), on cotton, Gossypium hirsutum L., across a 4000 ha farm in southeastern Arkansas. The influence of the percentage of corn, Z. mays L., cotton, rice, Oryz...

We describe the vertical and horizontal distribution of the cotton aphid Aphis gossypii Glover within a cotton plant in two cotton (Gossypium hirsutum Linnaeus) cultivars (BRS Safira and BRS Rubí) with colored fiber over the time. Measurements of aphid population dynamics and distribution in the cotton plants were recorded in intervals of seven days. The number of apterous or alate aphids and t...

The host plant expansion of host-specialized Aphis gossypii (Glover) has been well studied in the laboratory; however, this phenomenon is poorly understood in the field. Here, we provide a series of laboratory and field experiments to assess the role of zucchini in the host plant expansion of cotton-specialized aphids. We observed that cotton-specialized aphids possessed the ability to expand o...

Host specialization is a ubiquitous character of phytophagous insects. The polyphagous population is usually composed of some subpopulations that can use only a few closely related plants. Cotton-melon aphids, Aphis gossypii Glover exhibited strong host specialization, and the cotton- and cucurbits-specialized biotypes had been clearly identified. However, the experimental work that addressed t...

Five cotton cultivars were crossed in a complete diallel to study the inheritance of different polygenic traits. Genotypic differences were found to be significant (P<0.01) for all the characters. Adequacy tests disclosed that data of all the parameters were fully adequate for genetic analysis except bolls per plant, staple length, fibre strength, and fibre fineness, which was partially or not ...

Precision agriculture (PA) is an information-based technology, using detailed information within an agricultural field to optimize production inputs on a spatially variable basis, maximize farm profit, and minimize environmental impact. Information collection and processing plays a very important role in PA. In recent years PA technologies have been gradually adopted in cotton production. Sever...

Redroot pigweed is one of the injurious agricultural weeds on a worldwide basis. Understanding of its interference impact in crop field will provide useful information for weed control programs. The effects of redroot pigweed on cotton at densities of 0, 0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, and 8 plants m(-1) of row were evaluated in field experiments conducted in 2013 and 2014 at Institute of Cotton Res...

RNA interference (RNAi) has been developed as a powerful technique in the research of functional genomics as well as plant pest control. In this report, double-stranded RNAs (dsRNA) targeting 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase (HMGR) gene, which catalyze a rate-limiting enzymatic reaction in the mevalonate pathway of juvenile hormone (JH) synthesis in cotton bollworm, was expressed...