ornamental geophytes (ornamental flower bulbs) are international and national heritage considering their contribution to people's life quality around the world. iranian habitats support about 8000 species of flowering plants (belonging to 167 families and 100 genera) of which almost 1700 are endemic. iran is a rich country in terms of distribution of bulbous plants. more than 200 species of bul...

Dyer et al. (1) report a rapid decline in maize varieties grown by Mexican farmers, arguing that their results are in contrast with previously reported work. We believe that the support for this rapid decline is weak, and that the contrast with previously reported work is false. Dyer et al. (1) set up a straw man: they show that average household maize diversity reported in case studies has inc...

this study was conducted in order to sustainable conservation and utilization of trifolium genetic resources. a total of 1333 accessions of trifolium under 32 species from 27 provinces were collected according to ipgri descriptors. collected germplasms are conserved in mid- and long-term conservation at national plant gene bank of iran. statistical parameters of tendency to center and dispersio...

N.I. Vavilov’s theories direct present-day global activities in plant science, breeding, and conservation. His expeditions around the world located centers of diversity of crop evolution. Vavilov was one of the earliest scientists to realize that wild genetic diversity could be lost, through genetic erosion, reducing the possibilities for future crop improvement. To measure genetic erosion, Gar...

Trace metals are one of the groups of pollutants that reduce genetic variability in natural populations, causing the phenomenon known as "genetic erosion". In this study we evaluate the relationship between trace metals contamination (Hg, Cd and Cu) and genetic variability, assessed using fluorescent Inter-Simple Sequence Repeats (fISSRs). We used eight populations of a well-established biomoni...

The detrimental effects of genetic erosion on small isolated populations are widely recognized contrary to their interactions with environmental changes. The ability of genotypes to plastically respond to variability is probably essential for the persistence of these populations. Genetic erosion impact may be exacerbated if inbreeding affects plastic responses or if their maintenance were at hi...