Plant opal analysis of the Guangfucun Site in Wujiang City,Jiangsu Province

The Guangfucun Site is located in thewest of Taoyuan Town,Wujiang City,the furthest south end of JiagsuProvince.It is a Neolithic site datedto 6055±125 BP.The cultural de-posits belong to the Majiabang Cul-ture.This paper reported the resultsof plant opal analysis of the site and

A dCAPS marker developed from a stress associated protein gene TaSAP7-B governing grain size and plant height in wheat

Stress associated proteins（SAPs） are the A20/AN1 zinc-finger proteins which confer to abiotic stresses in plants. In this study, TaSAP7-B, including two AN1 domains, was isolated from B genome of wheat（Triticum aestivum L.）. Sequencing analysis on TaSAP7-B illustrated one In Del（insertion-deletion） and one SNP（single nucleotide polymorphism） in the promoter region while no diversity was observed in the coding region. On the basis of SNP in the promoter region（–260 bp）, a dCAPS（derived cleaved amplified polymorphic sequences） marker SNP-260 was developed for TaSAP7-B. Using a natural population consisting of 262 wheat accessions, significant associations were detected between the marker SNP-260 and agronomic traits, such as plant height（PH）, peduncle length（PL）, length of penultimate internode（LPI）, number of spike per plant（NSP）, and 1 000-grain weight（TGW）. Two genotypes were identified using marker SNP-260 in the natural population. Among them, the genotypes possessing C allele exhibited a higher TGW and shorter PH than the T genotypes. Hence, base C was considered as the superior allele. The dCAPS marker of TaSAP7-B can be instrumental for marker-assisted selection for high grain size and short plant height.

Impact of climate change on dynamic of plant communities, lakes and swamps in Beijing area during Holocene period

From 400-60 cm 26 samples were obtained in an 820 cm profile at Dongganchi of Fangshan in Beijing. They provided a continuous record of vegetation and environmental changes over ca .7000 aB.P., as inferred from Spore-pollen. loss-on-ignition (LOI), and charcoal analysis,impacts of natural fire and human activities on plant communities and lakes and swamps were considered. 1) From 7000-5960 aB.P, the forest development was limited, probably in response to climate Warming. Aquatic and marsh plants began to increase, bat the lakes and swamps in some areas were limited. 2) About 5960-3390 aB.p, presumably in responded to climate warming which was warmer than that at present Aquatic plants began to become abundant,reflected the widespread development of the lakes and swamps, the climate was wet with annual precipitation higher than that at present 3) About 3390-1000 aB.P, human activities have kept to be the dominating factor in the evolution of vegetation and climatic change. Temperature decreased, and the annual precipitation rapidly reduced in Baijing area. the lakes and swamps gradually shrank back, some of them even disappeared. 4) After 1000 aB.P, there was a severe fluntuction, and early during this time, it was comparatively warm and humid, but became cool and dry later. In the meantime. human activities were intensified. agricultural activity was flourished. and large area of water field was cultivated

Were Herod the Great’s Palace Gardens Unique?

Herod the Great built palaces and complexes with innovative excellence.This article explores his success in creating unique and luxurious gardens in desert areas.It does this by discussing the interaction between Herodian architecture already excavated by archaeologists and the newer science of garden archaeology.The investigation gives a realistic knowledge,through laboratory analysis of the plants grown in Herod’s gardens and how inventive he was.

Preparation, Characterization, and Application of Antiharpin_(xoo) Antibody

Polyclonal antiharpinxoo rabbit antibody has been prepared successfully using purified harpinxoo protein as an immunogen. The ELISA titer of the antiserum against harpinxoo was about 1：2 000. Western blot analysis showed that the antiserum could bind to the expression harpinxoo protein in particular, hrfl, encoding harpinxoo, is an expression in transgenic rice, detected by antiharpinxoo rabbit antibody. The rabbit antibody against harpinxoo can be used to study further about the biological function, harpinxoo localization, and hrfl gene expression in other plants.

Image based leaf segmentation and counting in rosette plants

This paper proposes an efficient method to extract the leaf region and count the number of leaves in digital plant images.The plant image analysis plays a significant role in viable and productive agriculture.It is used to record the plant growth,plant yield,chlorophyll fluorescence,plant width and tallness,leaf area,etc.frequently and accurately.Plant growth is a major character to be analyzed among these plant characters and it directly depends on the number of leaves in the plants.In this paper,a new method is presented for leaf region extraction from plant images and counting the number of leaves.The proposed method has three steps.The first step involves a new statistical based technique for image enhancement.The second step involves in the extraction of leaf region in plant image using a graph based method.The third step involves in counting the number of leaves in the plant image by applying Circular Hough Transform(CHT).The proposed work has been experimented on benchmark datasets of Leaf Segmentation Challenge(LSC).The proposed method achieves the segmentation accuracy of 95.4%and it also achieves the counting accuracy of
0.7(DiC)and 2.3(|DiC|)for datasets(A1,A2 and A3),which are better than the state-of-the-art methods.

Characteristics of microbial community involved in early biofilms formation under the influence of wastewater treatment plant effluent

Effluents from wastewater treatment plants（WWTPs） containing microorganisms and residual nutrients can influence the biofilm formation. Although the process and mechanism of bacterial biofilm formation have been well characterized, little is known about the characteristics and interaction of bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes in the early colonization, especially under the influence of WWTP effluent. The aim of this study was to characterize the important bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic species in the early stage of biofilm formation downstream of the WWTP outlet. Water and biofilm samples were collected 24 and 48 hr after the deposition of bio-cords in the stream. Illumina Miseq sequencing of the 16 S and 18 S rDNA showed that, among the three domains, the bacterial biofilm community had the largest alpha and beta diversity. The early bacterial colonizers appeared to be ＂biofilm-specific＂, with only a few dominant operational taxonomic units（OTUs） shared between the biofilm and the ambient water environment. Alpha-proteobacteria and Ciliophora tended to dominate the bacterial and eukaryotic communities, respectively, of the early biofilm already at 24 hr, whereas archaea played only a minor role during the early stage of colonization. The network analysis showed that the three domains of microbial community connected highly during the early colonization and it might be a characteristic of the microbial communities in the biofilm formation process where co-occurrence relationships could drive coexistence and diversity maintenance within the microbial communities.

Geomorphic predictors of riparian vegetation in small mountain watersheds

Aims Hydrogeomorphic processes operating at watershed,process zone and site scales influence the distribution of riparian vegeta-tion.However,most studies examining the relationships between hydrogeomorphic processes and riparian vegetation are conducted at site scales.We quantified the relative importance of watershed,process zone and site geomorphic characteristics for predicting riparian plant community types and plant species abundances in four small mountain watersheds in central Nevada,u.Methods We mapped riparian vegetation types and identified process zones(based on dominant geomorphic process and valley fill material)within the watersheds.We sampled sites in each combination of veg-etation type and process zone(n=184 sites)and collected data on watershed scale factors,valley and stream geomorphic characteristics and on plant cover of each geomorphic surface.Plant community types were defined by cluster and indicator species analyses of plant cover data,and related to geomorphic variables using ordination analysis(nonmetric multidimensional scaling).linear mixed effects models were used to predict abundances of indicator species.Important Findings Variables describing position in the watershed(elevation,contrib-uting area)that are related to gradients of temperature,moisture and stream discharge were of primary importance in predicting plant community types.Variables describing local geomorphic setting(valley width,stream gradient,channel sediments,geomor-phic surface height)were of secondary importance,but accurately described the geomorphic setting of indicator species.The process zone classification did not include position in the watershed or channel characteristics and only predicted plant community types with unique geomorphic settings.In small mountain watersheds,predicting riparian vegetation distribution requires explicit consid-eration of scale and geomorphic context within and among water-sheds in addition to site variables.