The fruit of the prickly pear cactus (“Tuna blanca”, Opuntia amyclaea) has a sweet juicy pulp containing numerous hard-coated seeds, which limit the overall acceptability of the fruit. This study extended previous attempts to develop prickly pear fruits with reduced or smaller seed structures by applying gibberellic acid to floral buds. Solutions of gibberellic acid (GA3) were applied by sprayi...

incompatibility in hazelnut (c. avellana l.) is the sporophytic type and under the control of a single s-locus with multiple alleles. compatibility of pollen-stigma in hazelnut is an important consideration in planning crosses in breeding program and in choosing pollinizers for orchard planting. in this study, fluorescence microscopy was used to determination of s-alleles and compatibility rela...

The function of stamen dimorphism in the breeding system of the alpine shrub Rhododendron ferrugineum was studied in two populations in the French Alps. This species has pentameric flowers with two whorls of stamens: an inner whorl of five long stamens and an outer whorl of short stamens. We studied the development of stamens from buds to mature flowers (measurement of the filament, anther, and...

Monoecy and protogyny are widespread in wind-pollinated plants and have been interpreted as outcrossing mechanisms, though few studies have investigated their function. Carex, a large genus of anemophilous herbs, is predominantly monoecious and many species are protogynous. We investigated whether monoecy and protogyny limit self-pollination in seven Carex species. We conducted field experiment...

Let A be a noetherian local ring, and let C in PA be a family of curves, flat over A. We showed in an earlier paper how to associate to C a locally free sheaf N on PA, and we showed that two families of curves C,C′ are in the same biliaison class if and only if the corresponding sheaves N,N ′ are pseudoisomorphic (generalization of the theorem Rao). In this paper we show how to find all the fla...

Pollinator and/or mate scarcity affects pollen transfer, with important ecological and evolutionary consequences for plant reproduction. However, the way in which the pollen loads transported by pollinators and deposited on stigmas are affected by pollination context has been little studied. We investigated the impacts of plant mate and visiting insect availabilities on pollen transport and rec...

The controversial provisions in the European Union’s Database Directive have created considerable uncertainty for commercial producers of databases, while recent case law has emasculated much of the Directive. However, researchers and academics must still work in a restrictive copyright environment within Europe. This paper reviews the Directive in the light of two recent UK reports that sugges...

This note presents analysis of the compression function of a recently proposed hash function, FORK-256. We exhibit some unexpected differentials existing for the step transformation and show their possible uses in collision-finding attacks on different simplified variants of FORK-256. Finally, as a concrete application of those observations we present a method of finding chosen IV collisions fo...

1. Ability to self-fertilize is correlated with invasiveness in several introduced floras, and this has been attributed to its mitigating effect on fecundity when pollinator visitation and mate availability are inadequate. Cross-pollination opportunities are expected to be most limited in isolated individuals and small populations, both typical of the leading edge of an invasion. Thus, self-pol...