Free proline accumulation in rice plants under different leaf water potential

Seedlings of drought-tolerance rice varieties Han 501and Han A03,and the drought sensitive varietiesNanjing 11 and Yanjing 2 were raised in a paddyfield and transplanted into pots at the age of 8leaves.Water stress started at the tillering stage byholding water from 0 MPa of the soil water potentialin pots till the leaves showed seriously wilting.

Planting Potential

FOR Xiao Renrong, 48, the small East African coastal country of Djibouti has become his second home. The experienced veterinarian has completed two year-long stints in Djibouti - in 2009 and 2012 - as an agricultural expert.

Microsatellite Development and Potential Application in Authentication, Conservation, and Genetic Improvement of Chinese Medicinal Plants

Medicinal plants are popular and widely used as a major source of herbal drugs and pharmaceutical compounds. Ever-growing demands make medicinal plants faced to several problems including efficacy and safety to meet business requirements, conservation, and artificially assisted breeding. As a powerful molecular tool, microsatellites offer the great potentials for various purposes in plants. This review provides a scenario of microsatellites in medicinal plants including development from genomic or expressed sequence tag libraries, cross-species transferability, genotyping, and potential applications. We emphasized on the authentication of medicinal plants by microsatellite markers.

Drought resistance of four grasses using pressure-volume curve

Pressure-volume curve(PV curve)technique is a major method for studying critical plant water potential and critical tissue water content when plasmolysis takes place.In the present study,a mathematical solution method is put forward to obtain parameters based on the PV curve.The cal-culated results for the parameters of Lolium perenne,Festuca arundinacea,Leymus chinensis and Stipa krylovii indicated that the mathematical solution method is convenient for actual research compared with the graphical method.Further analysis of the calculations suggested that drought resistance decreased in the following order:S.krylovii>F.arundinacea and L.chinensis>L.perenne.

Control of aliphatic halogenated DBP precursors with multiple drinking water treatment processes： Formation potential and integrated toxicity

The comprehensive control efficiency for the formation potentials（FPs） of a range of regulated and unregulated halogenated disinfection by-products（DBPs）（including carbonaceous DBPs（C-DBPs）, nitrogenous DBPs（N-DBPs）, and iodinated DBPs（I-DBPs）） with the multiple drinking water treatment processes, including pre-ozonation, conventional treatment（coagulation–sedimentation, pre-sand filtration）, ozone-biological activated carbon（O_3-BAC） advanced treatment, and post-sand filtration, was investigated. The potential toxic risks of DBPs by combing their FPs and toxicity values were also evaluated.The results showed that the multiple drinking water treatment processes had superior performance in removing organic/inorganic precursors and reducing the formation of a range of halogenated DBPs. Therein, ozonation significantly removed bromide and iodide,and thus reduced the formation of brominated and iodinated DBPs. The removal of organic carbon and nitrogen precursors by the conventional treatment processes was substantially improved by O_3-BAC advanced treatment, and thus prevented the formation of chlorinated C-DBPs and N-DBPs. However, BAC filtration leads to the increased formation of brominated C-DBPs and N-DBPs due to the increase of bromide/DOC and bromide/DON.After the whole multiple treatment processes, the rank order for integrated toxic risk values caused by these halogenated DBPs was haloacetonitriles（HANs）》haloacetamides（HAMs） 〉haloacetic acids（HAAs） 〉 trihalomethanes（THMs） 〉 halonitromethanes（HNMs） 》I-DBPs（I-HAMs and I-THMs）. I-DBPs failed to cause high integrated toxic risk because of their very low FPs. The significant higher integrated toxic risk value caused by HANs than other halogenated DBPs cannot be ignored.