(Press-News.org) The search is on for insects, mites, microbes or nematodes that could be used in a biologically based approach to controlling silverleaf nightshade, an invasive weed from the Americas that has spread to southern Europe, Africa, India, Australia and elsewhere.
According to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) entomologist Walker Jones, the perennial weed, Solanum elaeagnifolium, is being targeted for its ability to outcompete native plants, reduce crop yields and diminish pasture productivity. Its orange, toxin-producing berries can also poison livestock.
Severe infestations of silverleaf nightshade can render chemical or mechanical controls, like mowing, too costly, impractical or environmentally harmful to use, added Jones. He initiated the search for the weed's natural enemies as director of the European Biological Control Laboratory (EBCL), operated in Montpellier, France, by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS). ARS is USDA's principal intramural scientific research agency, and this research supports the USDA priority of promoting international food security.
Before returning to the United States this past April to lead the ARS Biological Control of Pests Research Unit in Stoneville, Miss., Jones, together with ARS National Program Leader Daniel Strickman, established a cooperative project with the Benaki Phytopathological Institute in Athens, Greece, to explore starting continental Europe's first-ever classical weed-biocontrol program. Candidate biocontrol agents are typically insects that severely damage or kill targeted weeds, sparing useful plants and striking a balance between the weed and its environment, explained Jones.
Normally, the EBCL serves as a "way station" where promising biocontrol agents collected from Europe, Asia or Africa are screened for potential release into the United States to manage invasive species there. But in this instance, the lab will serve as a receiving point for candidate organisms from North America that could open the door to biologically controlling infestations of the weed in Greece.
The project's early stages include genetically analyzing silverleaf nightshade populations collected from around the world and physically mapping Greece's infestations of the weed and densities using satellite photographs.
INFORMATION:
Read more about the research in the November-December 2010 issue of Agricultural Research magazine, available online at: http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/nov10/weed1110.htm.
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London, UK, 24 November 2010 – Research from the Laboratory of Psychiatry and Experimental Alzheimers Research (http://www2.i-med.ac.at/psychlab/) at the Medical University Innsbruck (Austria) demonstrated that chronic high fat cholesterol diet in rats exhibited pathologies similar to Alzheimer's disease. The results were published in Molecular Cellular Neuroscience (45(4):408-417, 2010) with lead author Dr. Christian Humpel. The study was co-authored by PhD students, Celine Ullrich and Michael Pirchl, from the same Laboratory.
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MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. -- Some of the universe's most massive galaxies may have formed billions of years earlier than current scientific models predict, according to surprising new research led by Tufts University. The findings appear in the Astrophysical Journal published online Nov. 24 in advance of print publication on Dec. 10, 2010.
"We have found a relatively large number of very massive, highly luminous galaxies that existed almost 12 billion years ago when the universe was still very young, about 1.5 billion years old. These results appear to disagree with ...
Children living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods are more likely to succeed if they participate in a community-based prevention program, according to findings released recently from a multi-year research study based at Queen's University.
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Electrical engineers generated short, powerful light pulses on a chip – an important step toward the optical interconnects that will likely replace the copper wires that carry information between chips within today's computers. University of California, San Diego electrical engineers recently developed the first ultra compact, low power pulse compressor on a silicon chip to be described in the scientific literature. Details appeared online in the journal Nature Communications on November 16.
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Suspicious packages and powders have triggered more than 30,000 responses by U.S. law enforcement agencies across the country since 2001. These events are expensive, time-consuming and potentially dangerous. To help first responders at all levels of government deal safely and more effectively with suspected biothreat agents, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and a broad team of federal, state and local agencies and other organizations worked together to update an existing standard for sample collection and develop overall guidance for when to collect ...
