Plants may adapt to alpine habitats by specialization in the reproductive strategy and functional aspects of their flowers and pollination systems. Alpine habitats reduce the opportunities for cross-pollination in a relatively high proportion of alpine plant species, and self-pollination may be favored in these adverse conditions.
Recently, Drs. AI Honglian and ZHOU Wei advised by Profs. WA...
Exploration of natural sources for novel bioactive compounds has been an emerging field of medicine over the past decades, providing drugs or lead compounds of considerable therapeutic potential. This research has provided exciting evidence on the isolation of microbe-derived metabolites having prospective biological activities. Mushrooms have been valued as traditional sources of natural bioac...
Pedicularis (Orobanchaceae) comprises approximately 600-800 species, one of the largest genera of flowering plants in the north temperate zone. About two thirds of these species are confined to the region of the Hengduan Mountains in southwestern China, which represents one of the main centers of species diversity and endemism for this genus. Pedicularis section Cyathophora is characterized by ...
Platinum-based drugs have become fundamental components of standard chemotherapy regiments, and are widely used in antitumor therapy of testicular and ovarian tumors, lung and colorectal carcinomas. Despite the therapeutic benefit, the efficacy of platinum-based treatment regiments is considerably compromised not only by severe side-effects but also by insurmountable cross-resistance.
With ...
The temperate bamboos are a morphologically diverse grass lineage with approximately 32 genera and 600 species distributed primarily in the North Temperate Zone or at high elevations in tropical regions of both the northern and southern hemispheres. There are approximately 430 species distributed in East Asia, of which 180 are endemic to Southwestern China. Previous phylogenetic studies strongl...
Chukrasia A. Juss. is a medium to large tree genus comprising only C. tabularis and C. tabularis var. velutina, distributed mainly in South and Southeast Asia. The timber of Chukrasia is high-grade wood famous all over the world. Besides, being huge and leafy, Chukrasia is often used as roadside or landscape trees.
Genus Chukrasia excels at generate diverse phragmalin limonoids with novel s...
The family Urticaceae consists of approximately 54 genera with more than 2000 species, and is widely distributed in tropical regions but less common in temperate regions, with by far the largest concentration of genera and species in tropical Asia. Historically, most of the diagnostic morphological characters used in classifications of Urticaceae are of such small size that microscopic work is ...
Stem xylem structure of a tree is strongly related to hydraulic efficiency, mechanical strength and resistance to embolism. It is hypothesized that there is a “trade-off triangle” among those three traits of xylem. Meanwhile, both water availability and air temperature can affect the development of xylem structure, which in turn influences the water supply and photosynthetic gas exchange in t...
Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway plays an important role in embryonic development, cell proliferation, differentiation as well as stem cells maintenance and self-renewal. Abnormal activation of Wnt signaling led to tumorigenesis of colon cancer, and many other malignancies, highlighting it as an important therapeutic target in cancer drug study. Isodon plants have been used in folk medicin...
