This textbook is written for students and is the product of more than three decades of my teaching experience. It intends to give a broad but concise overview of the various aspects of plant biochemistry, including molecular biology. I have attached importance to an easily understood description of the principles of metabolism but also have restricted the content in such a way that a student is…
This textbook is written for students and is the product of more than three decades of my teaching experience. It intends to give a broad but concise overview of the various aspects of plant biochemistry, including molecular biology. I have attached importance to an easily understood description of the principles of metabolism but also have restricted the content in such a way that a student is…
The genomics revolution of the past decade has greatly enhanced our understanding of the genetic composition of living organisms including many plant species of economic importance. Complete genomic sequences of Arabidopsis and several major crops, together with high-throughput technologies for analyses of transcripts, proteins and mutants, provide the basis for understanding the relationsh…
This volume of the series Medicinal Plants of the World: Chemical Constituents, Modern and Traditional Medicinal Uses contains information on 16 plant species and follows the same format as volumes 1 and 2. Some of the plants discussed in volume 3 may be considered controversial in their classification as “medicinal.” However, the Paracelsian dictum that “sola dosis fecit venenum” h…
When the first edition of this text appeared thirteen years ago, its writing was guided by several of objectives. • The text should be suited for a semester course for undergraduate students encountering the subject of plant physiology for the first time. It was assumed that the student would have completed a first course in botany or biology with a strong botanical component. The book sho…
When the first edition of this text appeared thirteen years ago, its writing was guided by several of objectives. • The text should be suited for a semester course for undergraduate students encountering the subject of plant physiology for the first time. It was assumed that the student would have completed a first course in botany or biology with a strong botanical component. The book sho…
There has been increasing interest in the nutritional properties of fruits and vegetables as sources of health-promoting phytochemical compounds, due to epidemiological data that correlate a high consumption of these compounds with a lower risk of several cardiovascular and degenerative diseases. Phytochemicals are a heterogeneous group of chemical compounds with numerous biological actions. Th…
Fruits and vegetables are consumed as fresh or processed into different type of products. Some of the naturally occurring enzymes in fruits and vegetables have undesirable effects on product quality, and therefore enzyme inactivation is required during fruit and vegetable processing in order to increase the product shelf-life. Commercial enzyme preparations are also used as processing aids…
All of the chemicals are not listed. Remember that each plant species contains hundreds of chemicals in the part per million levels, and thousands in the parts per trillion levels. Here, I select a few of those I deem more important, or about which there is current breaking news. Rarely, if ever, is any phytochemical working alone; more likely, phytochemicals are acting synergistically with…
Tree species are indispensably supportive to human life. Due to their long life cycle and environmental sensitivity, breeding trees to suit day-to-day human needs is a formidable challenge. Whether they are edible as apple, cocoa, mango, citrus, litchi, pear, dates, and coconut or industrially essential as rubber or beverages like coffee and tea, improving yield under optimal, suboptimal, …
† Background and Aims: The combination of clonality and a mating system promoting outcrossing is considered advantageous because outcrossing avoids the fitness costs of selfing within clones (geitonogamy) while clonality assures local persistence and increases floral display. The spatial spread of genetically identical plants (ramets) may, however, also decrease paternal diversity (the numb…
† Background and Aims: The use of vitamins including vitamin B1, B2 and K3 for the induction of systemic acquired resistance (SAR) to protect crops against plant pathogens has been evaluated previously. The use of vitamins is beneficial because it is cost effective and safe for the environment. The use of folate precursors, including ortho-aminobenzoic acid, to induce SAR against a soft-rot …
† Background and Aims: The Orchidaceae have a history of recurring convergent evolution in floral function as nectar production has evolved repeatedly froman ancestral nectarless state.However, orchids exhibit considerable diversity in nectary type, position and morphology, indicating that this convergence arose from alternative adaptive solutions. Using the genus Disa, this study asks wheth…
† Background and Aims: The coastal plain of Israel hosts the last few remaining populations of the endemic Iris atropurpurea (Iridaceae), a Red List species of high conservation priority. The flowers offer no nectar reward. Here the role of night-sheltering male solitary bees, honey-bees and female solitary bees as pollinators of I. atropurpurea is documented. † Methods: Breeding syste…
† Background: Plants in over one hundred families in habitats worldwide bear extrafloral nectaries (EFNs). EFNs display a remarkable diversity of evolutionary origins, as well as diverse morphology and location on the plant. They secrete extrafloral nectar, a carbohydrate-rich food that attracts ants and other arthropods, many of which protect the plant in return. By fostering ecologically …
† Background and Aims: Penium margaritaceum is a unicellular charophycean green alga with a unique bi-directional polar expansion mechanism that occurs at the central isthmus zone prior to cell division. This entails the focused deposition of cell-wall polymers coordinated by the activities of components of the endomembrane system and cytoskeletal networks. The goal of this study was to eluc…
† Background and Aims: Eversporting eudicots were sought to see if they behave like gymnosperms. Behaviour of eversporting gymnosperm chimeras indicates a single apical cell is present in SAM and it would be of interest to see if eudicot chimeras have the same behaviour. † Methods: Four eversporting spireas, the pineapple mint and the Silver King euonymus were inspected for the fate of…
† Background and Aims: Rhamnogalacturonan-II (RG-II) is one of the pectin motifs found in the cellwall of all land plants. It contains sugars such as 2-keto-3-deoxy-D-lyxo-heptulosaric acid (Dha) and 2-keto-3-deoxy-D-manno-octulosonic acid (Kdo), and within thewall RG-II is mostly found as a dimer via a borate diester cross-link.To date, little is knownregarding the biosynthesis of this mot…
† Background and Aims: Aluminium is toxic in acid soils because the soluble Al3+ inhibits root growth.Amechanism of Al3+ tolerance discovered in many plant species involves the release of organic anions fromroot apices. The Al3+ - activated release of citrate from the root apices of Al3+ -tolerant genotypes of barley is controlled by a MATE gene named HvAACT1 that encodes a citrate transpor…
† Background and Aims: The putative FASCICLIN-LIKE ARABINOGALACTAN PROTEIN 4 (At-FLA4) locus of Arabidopsis thaliana has previously been shown to be required for the normal growth of wild-type roots in response to moderately elevated salinity. However, the genetic and physiological pathway that connects At-FLA4 and normal root growth remains to be elucidated. † Methods: The radial swel…
† Background and Aims: Despite the selective pressure slugs may exert on seedling recruitment there is a lack of information in this context within grassland restoration studies. Selective grazing is influenced by interspecific differences in acceptability. As part of a larger study of how slug–seedling interactions may influence upland hay meadow restoration, an assessment of relative acc…
† Background and Aims: Paleoclimatic data indicate that an abrupt climate change occurred at the Eocene–Oligocene (E–O) boundary affecting the distribution of tropical forests on Earth. The same period has seen the emergence of South-East (SE) Asia, caused by the collision of the Eurasian and Australian plates. How the combination of these climatic and geomorphological factors affected …
† Backgrounds and Aims: Current research in plant science has concentrated on revealing ontogenetic processes of key attributes in plant evolution. One recently discussed model is the ‘transient model’ successful in explaining some types of inflorescence architectures based on two main principles: the decline of the so called ‘vegetativeness’ (veg) factor and the transient nature of…
† Background and Aims: Dioecism characterizes many crop species of economic value, including kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa). Kiwifruit male sterility occurs at the microspore stage. The cellwalls of the microspores and the pollen of the male-sterile and male-fertile flowers, respectively, differ in glucose and galactose levels. In numerous plants, pollen formation involves normal functioni…
† Background: Conservation of the unique biodiversity of mountain ecosystems needs trans-disciplinary approaches to succeed in a crowded colloquial world. Geographers, conservationists, ecologists and social scientists have, in the past, had the same conservation goals but have tended to work independently. In this review, the need to integrate different conservation criteria and methodolog…
† Background: Certain membrane-associated arabinogalactan-proteins (AGPs) with lysine-rich sub-domains participate in plant growth, development and resistance to stress. To complement fluorescence imaging of such molecules when tagged and introduced transgenically to the cell periphery and to extend the groundwork for assessing molecular structure, some behaviours of surface-spread AGPs were…
† Background: Strigolactones (SLs) – a group of plant hormones and their derivatives – have been found to play a role in the regulation of root development, in addition to their role in suppression of lateral shoot branching: they alter root architecture and affect root-hair elongation, and SL signalling is necessary for the root response to low phosphate (Pi) conditions. These effects …
† Background and Aims: Large floral displays have opposing consequences for animal-pollinated angiosperms: they attract more pollinators but also enable elevated among-flower self-pollination (geitonogamy). The presence of sterile flowers as pollinator signals may enhance attraction while allowing displays of fewer open fertile flowers, limiting geitonogamy. The simultaneous contributions of…
† Background: A hypothetical ideotype is presented to optimize water and N acquisition by maize root systems. The overall premise is that soil resource acquisition is optimized by the coincidence of root foraging and resource availability in time and space. Since water and nitrate enter deeper soil strata over time and are initially depleted in surface soil strata, root systems with rapid e…
† Background and Aims: Allometric relationships and the determination of critical buckling heights have been examined for Pinus radiata in the past. However, how they relate to more mature Pinus radiata exhibiting a wide range of stem diameters, slenderness and modulus of elasticity (E) at operationally used stand densities is largely unknown. The aim of this study was to examine the relatio…
† Background and Aims: Plant genotypic mixtures have the potential to increase yield stability in variable, often unpredictable environments, yet knowledge of the specific mechanisms underlying enhanced yield stability remains limited. Field studies are constrained by environmental conditions which cannot be fully controlled and thus reproduced. A suitable model system would allow reproduci…
† Background and Aims: Invasive plants can be released from specialist herbivores and encounter novel generalists in their introduced ranges, leading to variation in defence among native and invasive populations. However, fewstudies have examined how constitutive and induced indirect defences change during plant invasion, especially during the juvenile stage. † Methods: Constitutive e…
† Background and Aims: The sedge genus Carex, the most diversified angiosperm genus of the northern temperate zone, is renowned for its holocentric chromosomes and karyotype variability. The genus exhibits high variation in chromosome numbers both among and within species. Despite the possibility that this chromosome evolution may play a role in the high species diversity of Carex, populatio…
† Background and Aims: A positive correlation between tissue thickness and crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) expression has been frequently suggested. Therefore, this study addressed the question of whether water availability modulates photosynthetic plasticity in different organs of two epiphytic orchids with distinct leaf thickness. † Methods: Tissue morphologyand photosyntheticmod…
† Background and Aims: Leaf hydraulic properties are strongly linked with transpiration and photosynthesis in many species. However, it is not known if gas exchange and hydraulics will have co-ordinated responses to climate change. The objective of this study was to investigate the responses of leaf hydraulic conductance (Kleaf) in Glycine max (soybean) to growth at elevated [CO2] and incre…
† Background and Aims: Root hairs are responsible for water and nutrient uptake from the soil and their growth is responsive to biotic and abiotic changes in their environment. Root hair expansion is a polarized process requiring secretory and endosomal pathways that deliver and recycle plasma membrane and cell wall material to the growing root hair tip. In this paper, the role of VTI13 (A…
† Background and Aims: The most plausible explanation for treeline formation so far is provided by the growth limitation hypothesis (GLH), which proposes that carbon sinks are more restricted by low temperatures than by carbon sources. Evidence supporting the GLH has been strong in evergreen, but less and weaker in deciduous treeline species. Here a test is made of the GLH in deciduous–ev…
† Background and Aims: Blue-green iridescence in the tropical rainforest understorey sedge Mapania caudata creates structural coloration in its leaves through a novel photonic mechanism. Known structures in plants producing iridescent blues consist of altered cellulose layering within cell walls and in special bodies, and thylakoid membranes in specialized plastids. This study was undertake…
† Background and Aims: C4 eudicot species are classified into biochemical sub-types of C4 photosynthesis based on the principal decarboxylating enzyme. Two sub-types are known, NADP-malic enzyme (ME) and NAD-ME; however, evidence for the occurrence or involvement of the third sub-type (phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase; PEP-CK) is emerging. In this study, the presence and activity of PEP-CK …
† Background and Aims: Sexual reproduction is one of the most important moments in a life cycle, determining the genetic composition of individual offspring. Controlled pollination experiments often show high variation in the mating system at the individual level, suggesting a persistence of individual variation in natural populations. Individual variation in mating patterns may have signifi…
† Background and Aims: Seeds of the moist temperate woodland species Galanthus nivalis and Narcissus pseudonarcissus, dispersed during spring or early summer, germinated poorly in laboratory tests. Seed development and maturation were studied to better understand the progression from developmental to germinable mode in order to improve seed collection and germination practices in these and s…
† Background and Aims: Carnivorous plants of the genus Nepenthes possess modified leaves that form pitfall traps in order to capture prey, mainly arthropods, to make additional nutrients available for the plant. These pitchers contain a digestive fluid due to the presence of hydrolytic enzymes. In this study, the composition of the digestive fluid was further analysed with regard to mineral…
† Background and Aims: In trees, bud development is driven by endogenous and exogenous factors such as species and climate, respectively. However, knowledge is scarce on how these factors drive changes in bud size across different time scales. † Methods: The seasonal patterns of apical bud enlargement are related to primary and secondary growth in two coexisting Mediterranean oaks wit…
† Background: There is a large body of literature on competitive interactions among plants, but many studies have only focused on above-ground interactions and little is known about root–root dynamics between interacting plants. The perspective on possible mechanisms that explain the outcome of root–root interactions has recently been extended to include non-resource-driven mechanisms (a…
† Background and Aims: This study is a first step in a multi-stage project aimed at determining allometric relationships mong the tropical tree organs, and carbon fluxes between the various tree parts and their environment. Information on canopy–root interrelationships is needed to improve understanding of above- and below ground processes and for modelling of the regional and global carbo…
† Background and Aims: Anoxic conditions are seldom considered in root iron plaque induction of wetland plants in hydroponic experiments, but such conditions are essential for root iron plaque formation in the field. Although ferrous ion availability and root radial oxygen loss capacity are generally taken into account, neglect of anoxic conditions in root iron plaque formation might lead t…
† Background and Aims: Root cortical aerenchyma (RCA) increases water and nutrient acquisition by reducing the metabolic costs of soil exploration. In this study the hypothesis was tested that living cortical area (LCA; transversal root cortical area minus aerenchyma area and intercellular air space) is a better predictor of root respiration, soil exploration and, therefore, drought toleranc…
† Background and Aims: Although the large variation in genome size among different species is widely acknowledged, the occurrence and extent of variation below the species level are still controversial and have not yet been satisfactorily analysed. The aim of this study was to assess genome size variation in six ploidy levels (2n = 3x–8x) of the polyploid Allium oleraceum over a large geog…
† Background and Aims: In mature quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) seeds, the lasting endosperm forms a micropylar cone covering the radicle. The suspensor cells lie within the centre of the cone. During the final stage of seed development, the cells of the lasting endosperm accumulate protein and lipids while the rest are crushed and disintegrated. Both the suspensor and endosperm die progressi…