Urticaceae is a family with more than 2000 species, which contains remarkable morphological diversity. It has undergone many taxonomic reorganizations, and is currently the subject of further systematic studies. To gain more resolution in systematic studies and to better understand the general patterns of character evolution in Urticaceae, based on our previous phylogeny including 169 accession...
Thrombotic disease is one of the major causes of human death. Unfortunately, almost all anticoagulants currently used could cause severe risk of bleeding. Because intrinsic coagulant factors are necessary for thrombosis but not required for hemostasis, developing new anticoagulants which selectively inhibit components of the intrinsic coagulant factors has become a hot and challenging focus in ...
Natural hybridization in plants is universal and plays an important role in evolution. Based on morphology it has been presumed that hybridization occurred in the genus Buddleja, though genetic studies confirming this assumption have not been conducted to date. The two species B. crispa and B. officinalis overlap in their distributions over a wide range in South-West China, and we aimed to prov...
palaeoenvironmental information in geological time and also a baseline reference for understanding future climatic change. The inverse relationship between atmospheric CO2 partial pressure (pCO2) and stomatal frequency in many species of plants has been widely used to estimate palaeoatmospheric CO2 (palaeo-CO2) levels. In contrast to the negative correlations detected for most other species tha...
Heterostyly is a conspicuous floral polymorphism in which non-random mating is usually enforced by a strong diallelic self-incompatibility system that ensures intermorph mating by preventing self and intramorph mating. Populations of heterostylous species contain either two (distyly) or three (tristyly) floral morphs that differ reciprocally in the relative positions of stigmas and anthers, a c...
Vitis vinifera ( grape ) is one of the most economically significant fruit crops in the world. The availability of the recently released grape genome sequence offers the opportunity to identify and analyze some important gene families in this species. Subtilases are a group of subtilisin-like serine proteases that are involved in many biological processes in plants. However, no comprehensive st...
Variation in plant phenology is one of the most sensitive ecological responses to climate change. Changes to species’ phenology can have a wide range of impacts on ecological processes, agriculture, forestry, food supply, and human healthy. Most studies that evaluated species responses to global warming have shown progressive advances in spring phenology. However, unchanged and delayed spring ...
The genus Pestalotiopsis is a highly creative genus which has been shown to produce more than 300 chemically novel, diverse, bioactive metabolites. Species of Pestalotiopsis commonly occur as plant pathogens or endophytes and have been the subject of considerable novel compound discovery research. Most of these novel compounds discovered from Pestalotiopsis were derived from unnamed species of ...
Eriocalyxin B, an ent-kaurene diterpenoid, possesses potent bioactivity of antitumor and anti-autoimmune. Related studies have been devoted to elucidating the underlying mechanisms of the bioactivities of EriB, among which the NF-κB signaling is largely involved. Though extensive investigations of the mechanism involved in the inhibition of NF-κB signaling by EriB have been reported, the ...
