Organic and low-input agriculture needs flexible varieties that can buffer environmental stress and adapt to the needs of farmers. We implemented an experiment to investigate the evolutionary capacities of a sample of spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.) population varieties for a number of phenotypic traits. Three farmers cultivated, selected and multiplied one or several populations over two years ...

Background: Oleuropein (OE) is the most abundant biophenol compounds in olive leaves and its healthy effects as a strong antioxidant is well known. The oleuropein level in olives depends upon cultivated variety, climate, place, time and the method of extraction. In Lorestan province, many varieties of olive have been cultivated that the study of OE level in their leaves, as whilst sources of th...

BACKGROUND Organic agriculture involve plants which are cultivated without using synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers and promotes biodiversity, biological cycles and improve the product quality. The carotenoids, total polyphenols and the antioxidant activity from skins of some wine and table grapes cultivated in organic and conventional agriculture were studied. RESULTS The main c...

• Research into the adoption of improved legume varieties provides evidence that farmers are now growing these in many developing countries and regions. • There has been large-scale adoption of improved chickpea varieties in southern India and small-scale adoption in the Horn of Africa. Specifically, there has been a shift in cultivated area from north to south/central India that is attributed ...

Although manioc is well adapted to nutrient-poor Oxisols of Amazonia, ethnobotanical observations show that bitter manioc is also frequently cultivated in the highly fertile soils of the floodplains and Amazonian dark earths (ADE) along the middle Madeira River. Because different sets of varieties are grown in each soil type, and there are agronomic similarities between ADE and floodplain varie...

The genus Perilla, known as an oil crop or a Chinese medicine, vegetable crop, is widely cultivated in East Asia. It occurs in two distinct varieties, var. frutescens and var. crispa, and their genetic relationship is still obscure. To understand the genetic diversity and relationships of the cultivated and weedy types of Perilla crops in Korea, Japan and China, we evaluated the genetic variati...

Two hundred thirty-five cultivated varieties, breeding lines and plant introductions of Arachis hypogaea and 12 accessions of wild Arachis spp. were tested for resistance to Meloidogyne hapla. Eight of the cultivated peanut lines were only moderately susceptible and four of the wild peanuts exhibited resistance. No resistance-breaking M. hapla populations were found among 10 geographical isolat...

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is an economic important crop and one of the major grain legumes for human consumption in Latin America, Africa and Asia. A morphological study of shoot induced from embryonic axes development in four Costa Rican bean varieties (Brunca, Huetar, Guaymi and Bribri) cultivated on MS media with or without 5 mg·L de N-benzylaminopurine (BAP) by scanning electron m...

Due to the remarkable adaptability to various environments, rice varieties with diverse flowering times have been domesticated or improved from Oryza rufipogon. Detailed knowledge of the genetic factors controlling flowering time will facilitate understanding the adaptation mechanism in cultivated rice and enable breeders to design appropriate genotypes for distinct preferences. In this study, ...

The history of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) improvement includes genetic bottlenecks, wild species introgressions, and divergence into distinct market classes. This history makes tomato an excellent model to investigate the effects of selection on genome variation. A combination of linkage mapping in two F(2) populations and physical mapping with emerging genome sequence data was used to po...