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Royal Society Open Science Mar 2019Soil detritivores such as Collembola impact plant growth, tissue nutrient concentration and gene expression. Using a model system with pedunculate oak () microcuttings...
Soil detritivores such as Collembola impact plant growth, tissue nutrient concentration and gene expression. Using a model system with pedunculate oak () microcuttings that display a typical endogenous rhythmic growth with alternating shoot (SF) and root flushes (RF), we investigated the transcriptomic response of oak with and without mycorrhiza () to the presence of Collembola (), and linked it to changes in resource allocation by pulse labelling the plants with C and N. Collembola impacted Gene Ontology (GO) terms as well as plant morphology and elemental ratios with the effects varying markedly with developmental phases. During SF Collembola increased GO terms related to primary growth and this was mirrored in increased C and N excess in aboveground plant compartments. During RF, Collembola increased GO terms related to plant secondary metabolism and physical fortification. Further, Collembola presence resulted in an increase in plant defence-related GO terms suggesting that Collembola in the rhizosphere prime oak shoots against the attack by fungi or herbivores. Notably, the impact of Collembola on growth, resource allocation and oak gene expression was modified by presence of . The results indicate that oaks clearly react to the presence of Collembola in the rhizosphere and respond in a complex way by changing the expression of genes of both primary and secondary metabolism, and this resulted in concomitant changes in plant morphology and physiology.
PubMed: 31032040
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.181869 -
Plant, Cell & Environment Dec 2012The indirect defences of plants are comprised of herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) that among other things attract the natural enemies of insects. However, the...
The indirect defences of plants are comprised of herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) that among other things attract the natural enemies of insects. However, the actual extent of the benefits of HIPV emissions in complex co-evolved plant-herbivore systems is only poorly understood. The observation that a few Quercus robur L. trees constantly tolerated (T-oaks) infestation by a major pest of oaks (Tortrix viridana L.), compared with heavily defoliated trees (susceptible: S-oaks), lead us to a combined biochemical and behavioural study. We used these evidently different phenotypes to analyse whether the resistance of T-oaks to the herbivore was dependent on the amount and scent of HIPVs and/or differences in non-volatile polyphenolic leaf constituents (as quercetin-, kaempferol- and flavonol glycosides). In addition to non-volatile metabolic differences, typically defensive HIPV emissions differed between S-oaks and T-oaks. Female moths were attracted by the blend of HIPVs from S-oaks, showing significantly higher amounts of (E)-4,8-dimethyl-1,3,7-nonatriene (DMNT) and (E)-β-ocimene and avoid T-oaks with relative high fraction of the sesquiterpenes α-farnesene and germacrene D. Hence, the strategy of T-oaks exhibiting directly herbivore-repellent HIPV emissions instead of high emissions of predator-attracting HIPVs of the S-oaks appears to be the better mechanism for avoiding defoliation.
Topics: Animals; Chromatography, Gas; Feeding Behavior; Female; Mass Spectrometry; Moths; Quercus; Volatile Organic Compounds
PubMed: 22632165
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-3040.2012.02545.x -
Memorias Do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz 1991Searching for the natural vector of Plasmodium juxtanucleare in an enzootic locality: Granjas Calábria (33% of the chickens infected), Jacarepaguá, in Rio de Janeiro,...
Searching for the natural vector of Plasmodium juxtanucleare in an enzootic locality: Granjas Calábria (33% of the chickens infected), Jacarepaguá, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 13 comparative captures of mosquitoes were carried out, simultaneously on man (out-doors) and on chicken (in a poultry-yard), between 6 and 9 p.m., from September 1988 to March 1989. Culex saltanensis was the most frequent species in captures on chicken, accounting for 41.7% of the mosquitoes collected on this bait, showing to be highly ornithophilic (90% captured on chicken versus 10% on man). Seven specimens of Cx. saltanensis were found naturally infected in Granjas Calábria: five with mature pedunculate oocysts and two with sporozoites (one in the haemocoele and one in the salivary glands). These sporozoites produced an infection by P. juxtanucleare in a chick, which had parasitemia on day 41 after inoculation. One Cx. coronator was found with mature pedunculate oocysts. Culex saltanensis was regarded as primary vector of P. juxtanucleare in Rio de Janeiro for being highly ornithophilic and in enough density to maintain the transmission, having been found with infective sporozoites in its salivary glands, and being susceptible to the parasite and able to transmit experimentally it by the bite.
Topics: Animals; Brazil; Chickens; Culex; Feeding Behavior; Female; Insect Vectors; Malaria, Avian; Male; Plasmodium
PubMed: 1842406
DOI: 10.1590/s0074-02761991000100014 -
BMC Genomics Nov 2010The Fagaceae family comprises about 1,000 woody species worldwide. About half belong to the Quercus family. These oaks are often a source of raw material for biomass...
BACKGROUND
The Fagaceae family comprises about 1,000 woody species worldwide. About half belong to the Quercus family. These oaks are often a source of raw material for biomass wood and fiber. Pedunculate and sessile oaks, are among the most important deciduous forest tree species in Europe. Despite their ecological and economical importance, very few genomic resources have yet been generated for these species. Here, we describe the development of an EST catalogue that will support ecosystem genomics studies, where geneticists, ecophysiologists, molecular biologists and ecologists join their efforts for understanding, monitoring and predicting functional genetic diversity.
RESULTS
We generated 145,827 sequence reads from 20 cDNA libraries using the Sanger method. Unexploitable chromatograms and quality checking lead us to eliminate 19,941 sequences. Finally a total of 125,925 ESTs were retained from 111,361 cDNA clones. Pyrosequencing was also conducted for 14 libraries, generating 1,948,579 reads, from which 370,566 sequences (19.0%) were eliminated, resulting in 1,578,192 sequences. Following clustering and assembly using TGICL pipeline, 1,704,117 EST sequences collapsed into 69,154 tentative contigs and 153,517 singletons, providing 222,671 non-redundant sequences (including alternative transcripts). We also assembled the sequences using MIRA and PartiGene software and compared the three unigene sets. Gene ontology annotation was then assigned to 29,303 unigene elements. Blast search against the SWISS-PROT database revealed putative homologs for 32,810 (14.7%) unigene elements, but more extensive search with Pfam, Refseq_protein, Refseq_RNA and eight gene indices revealed homology for 67.4% of them. The EST catalogue was examined for putative homologs of candidate genes involved in bud phenology, cuticle formation, phenylpropanoids biosynthesis and cell wall formation. Our results suggest a good coverage of genes involved in these traits. Comparative orthologous sequences (COS) with other plant gene models were identified and allow to unravel the oak paleo-history. Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were searched, resulting in 52,834 SSRs and 36,411 SNPs. All of these are available through the Oak Contig Browser http://genotoul-contigbrowser.toulouse.inra.fr:9092/Quercus_robur/index.html.
CONCLUSIONS
This genomic resource provides a unique tool to discover genes of interest, study the oak transcriptome, and develop new markers to investigate functional diversity in natural populations.
Topics: Base Sequence; Cluster Analysis; Computational Biology; Contig Mapping; Expressed Sequence Tags; Gene Library; Genes, Plant; Microsatellite Repeats; Peptides; Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; Quercus; RNA, Messenger; Sequence Analysis, DNA; Sequence Homology, Nucleic Acid; Software; Species Specificity; Temperature; Trees
PubMed: 21092232
DOI: 10.1186/1471-2164-11-650 -
Materials (Basel, Switzerland) Jan 2023Subfossil wood is a valuable and rare material often used for production of expensive furniture and decorative artistic items of unique beauty. Its mechanical and...
Subfossil wood is a valuable and rare material often used for production of expensive furniture and decorative artistic items of unique beauty. Its mechanical and tribological properties are still being studied and are considered specific due to the particular conditions of its long-lasting formation in aqueous sediment sludge. Various elements that have been impregnated into the wood tissue over many years make the machining and grinding of this type of wood rather difficult compared to normal recent wood. The main objective of this study was to determine the influence of the abrasive grain size of sandpaper on the abrasion volume loss of recent and two subfossil oak samples in three characteristic sections (cross, radial, and tangential). The results showed that the average size of abrasive grains and the orientation of the wood structure have an influence on the abrasion volume loss of all three samples. The phenomenon of the critical size of abrasive grains was observed in all samples and on all sections. As the size of abrasive grains increased to the critical size, the abrasive volume loss of the sample increased simultaneously. The lowest abrasion volume loss was observed on recent oak. In all samples, the lowest volume loss was measured on the cross sections, and the tangential and radial sections had mutually equal values. It was also found that the increase in the size of abrasive grains to a critical value resulted in the increasing value of the absolute difference between the abrasion volume loss of the cross, radial, and tangential section samples, while the relative relations between the abrasive volume loss values of three different sections (C/R, C/T, R/T) within the same grit of sandpaper remained quite similar.
PubMed: 36614771
DOI: 10.3390/ma16010432 -
Current Biology : CB Jun 2014In his monograph on Cirripedia from 1851, Darwin pointed to a highly unusual, plateless, and most likely parasitic barnacle of uncertain phylogenetic affinity. Darwin's...
In his monograph on Cirripedia from 1851, Darwin pointed to a highly unusual, plateless, and most likely parasitic barnacle of uncertain phylogenetic affinity. Darwin's barnacle was Anelasma squalicola, found on deep-water sharks of the family Etmopteridae, or lantern sharks. The barnacle is uncommon and is therefore rarely studied. Recent observations by us have shown that they occur at an unusually high prevalence on the velvet belly lantern shark, Etmopterus spinax, in restricted fjord areas of western Norway. A phylogenetic analysis based on ribosomal DNA data (16S, 18S, and 28S) from 99 selected barnacle species, including all available pedunculate barnacle sequences from GenBank, shows that A. squalicola is most closely related (sister taxon) to the pedunculate barnacle Capitulum mitella. Both C. mitella and species of Pollicipes, situated one node higher in the tree, are conventional suspension feeders from the rocky intertidal. Our phylogenetic analysis now makes it possible to establish morphological homologies between A. squalicola and its sister taxon and provides the evolutionary framework to explain the unprecedented transition from a filter-feeding barnacle to a parasitic mode of life.
Topics: Animals; Biological Evolution; Feeding Behavior; Host-Parasite Interactions; Molecular Sequence Data; Phylogeny; RNA, Ribosomal, 16S; RNA, Ribosomal, 18S; RNA, Ribosomal, 28S; Sequence Analysis, DNA; Sharks; Thoracica
PubMed: 24909326
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.05.030 -
Atmospheric Environment (Oxford,... May 2012In this study, we investigated the emissions, including odor, from log wood stoves, burning wood types indigenous to mid-European countries such as Austria, Czech...
In this study, we investigated the emissions, including odor, from log wood stoves, burning wood types indigenous to mid-European countries such as Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland, as well as Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria (Germany) and South Tyrol (Italy). The investigations were performed with a modern, certified, 8 kW, manually fired log wood stove, and the results were compared to emissions from a modern 9 kW pellet stove. The examined wood types were deciduous species: black locust, black poplar, European hornbeam, European beech, pedunculate oak (also known as "common oak"), sessile oak, turkey oak and conifers: Austrian black pine, European larch, Norway spruce, Scots pine, silver fir, as well as hardwood briquettes. In addition, "garden biomass" such as pine cones, pine needles and dry leaves were burnt in the log wood stove. The pellet stove was fired with softwood pellets. The composite average emission rates for log wood and briquettes were 2030 mg MJ for CO; 89 mg MJ for NO, 311 mg MJ for CH, 67 mg MJ for particulate matter PM and average odor concentration was at 2430 OU m. CO, CH and PM emissions from pellets combustion were lower by factors of 10, 13 and 3, while considering NO - comparable to the log wood emissions. Odor from pellets combustion was not detectable. CH and PM10 emissions from garden biomass (needles and leaves) burning were 10 times higher than for log wood, while CO and NO rise only slightly. Odor levels ranged from not detectable (pellets) to around 19,000 OU m (dry leaves). The odor concentration correlated with CO, CH and PM. For log wood combustion average odor ranged from 536 OU m for hornbeam to 5217 OU m for fir, indicating a considerable influence of the wood type on odor concentration.
PubMed: 23471123
DOI: 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2012.01.044 -
PloS One 2015Quercus robur L. (pedunculate oak) and Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl. (sessile oak) are two European oak species of great economic and ecological importance. Even though...
Quercus robur L. (pedunculate oak) and Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl. (sessile oak) are two European oak species of great economic and ecological importance. Even though both oaks have wide ecological amplitudes of suitable growing conditions, forests dominated by oaks often fail to regenerate naturally. The regeneration performance of both oak species is assumed to be subject to a variety of variables that interact with one another in complex ways. The novel approach of this research was to study the effect of many ecological variables on the regeneration performance of both oak species together and identify key variables and interactions for different development stages of the oak regeneration on a large scale in the field. For this purpose, overstory and regeneration inventories were conducted in oak dominated forests throughout southern Germany and paired with data on browsing, soil, and light availability. The study was able to verify the assumption that the occurrence of oak regeneration depends on a set of variables and their interactions. Specifically, combinations of site and stand specific variables such as light availability, soil pH and iron content on the one hand, and basal area and species composition of the overstory on the other hand. Also browsing pressure was related to oak abundance. The results also show that the importance of variables and their combinations differs among the development stages of the regeneration. Light availability becomes more important during later development stages, whereas the number of oaks in the overstory is important during early development stages. We conclude that successful natural oak regeneration is more likely to be achieved on sites with lower fertility and requires constantly controlling overstory density. Initially sufficient mature oaks in the overstory should be ensured. In later stages, overstory density should be reduced continuously to meet the increasing light demand of oak seedlings and saplings.
Topics: Biomass; Climate; Conservation of Natural Resources; Ecosystem; Germany; Hydrogen-Ion Concentration; Light; Plant Dispersal; Plant Leaves; Quercus; Seedlings; Soil
PubMed: 26266803
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134935 -
Brazilian Journal of Biology = Revista... Aug 2013The occurrence of Syagrus inajai (Spruce) Becc., popularly known as pupunha palm, among other names, has been registered in the Guianas and in the North of Brazil in...
The occurrence of Syagrus inajai (Spruce) Becc., popularly known as pupunha palm, among other names, has been registered in the Guianas and in the North of Brazil in areas of terra firme (non-flooding) and gallery forests. In order to characterize the inflorescence and further knowledge of this family, a morphoanatomical study was carried out of the palm S. inajai in a green area of the Campus of the Federal University of Amazonas--UFAM, Manaus, Amazonas. The inflorescences are branched to one order, pedunculate, and interfoliar, measuring 62-82 cm in length, with woody bracts with longitudinal grooves on the external surface, and flowers in triads. The number of flowers to each inflorescence varies from 5,904 to 17,316 for staminate flowers, and from 180 to 3,528 for pistillate flowers. Staminate flowers with six anthers and one vascular bundle each; three-lobed pistillodium, vascularized pistillodium. Its pistillate flowers have six staminodia joined to form a circle, syncarpic, tricarpellary, trilocular gynoecium, one ovule to each locule, synascidiate in the ovary, and plicated above. Tripartite stigma, apical and sessile, with epidermis composed of elongated papillary cells, pattern of epidermis that is maintained throughout the stylar canal. Bitegmented, anatrope, pachychalazal ovule.
Topics: Arecaceae; Brazil; Flowers; Inflorescence; Microscopy, Electron, Scanning
PubMed: 24212708
DOI: 10.1590/S1519-69842013000300025 -
Plant, Cell & Environment Jul 2011Soil flooding is an environmental constraint that is increasingly important for forest ecosystems, affecting tree growth and regeneration. As a result, selection... (Comparative Study)
Comparative Study
Soil flooding is an environmental constraint that is increasingly important for forest ecosystems, affecting tree growth and regeneration. As a result, selection pressure will alter forest diversity and distribution by favouring tree species tolerant of soil oxygen deprivation. Sessile and pedunculate oaks are the most abundant oak species and they exhibit a strong differential tolerance to waterlogging. In order to gain some understanding of the mechanisms of tolerance of both species to hypoxia, we undertook the characterization of the physiological, morphological, cellular and molecular responses of both species to flooding stress. Our results indicate that pedunculate oak, the more tolerant species, succeeded in maintaining its growth, water status and photosynthetic activity at a higher level than sessile oak. Furthermore, pedunculate oak developed aerenchyma in its root cortex as well as adventitious roots. The later exhibited a strong accumulation of class1 non-symbiotic haemoglobin localized by in situ hybridization in the protoderm and in some cortical cells. In conclusion, the higher tolerance of pedunculate oak to flooding was associated with an enhanced capacity to maintain photosynthesis and water homeostasis, coupled with the development of adaptive features (aerenchyma, adventitious roots) and with a higher expression of non-symbiotic haemoglobin in the roots.
Topics: Adaptation, Physiological; Biomass; Ecosystem; Floods; Gene Expression Profiling; Genes, Plant; Hemoglobins; Photoperiod; Photosynthesis; Plant Proteins; Plant Roots; Plant Shoots; Plant Stomata; Quercus; Stress, Physiological; Water; Xylem
PubMed: 21410709
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-3040.2011.02309.x