The development and dispersal of seeds as well as their transition to seedlings represent perhaps the most critical stages of a plant’s life cycle The endophytic and epiphytic microbial interactions that take place in, on, and around seeds during these stages of the plant’s life cycle may have profound impacts on plant ecology, health, and productivity While our understanding of the seed microbiota has lagged far behind that of the rhizosphere and phyllosphere, many advances are now being made This review explores the microbial associations with seeds through various stages of the plant life cycle, beginning with the earliest stages of seed development on the parent plant and continuing through the development and establishment of seedlings in soil This review represents a broad synthesis of the ecological and agricultural literature focused on seed-microbe interactions as a means of better understanding how these interactions may ultimately influence plant ecology, health, and productivity in both natural and agricultural systems Our current understanding of seed-microbe associations will be discussed, with an emphasis on recent findings that specifically highlight the emerging contemporary understanding of how seed-microbe associations may ultimately impact plant health and productivity The diversity and dynamics of seed microbiomes represent the culmination of complex interactions with microbes throughout the plant life cycle The richness and dynamics of seed microbiomes is revealing exciting new opportunities for research into plant-microbe interactions Often neglected in plant microbiome studies, the renaissance of inquiry into seed microbiomes is offering exciting new insights into how the diversity and dynamics of the seed microbiome with plant and soil microbiomes as well as the microbiomes of dispersers and pollinators It is clear that the interactions taking place in and around seeds indeed have significant impacts on plant health and productivity in both agricultural and natural ecosystems

/pdf/the-seed-microbiome-origins-interactions-and-impacts-3lsd8z1y4q.pdf

The seed microbiome: Origins, interactions, and impacts

Sweet sorghum is a promising target for biofuel production. It is a C4 crop with low input requirements and accumulates high levels of sugars in its stalks. However, large-scale planting on marginal lands would require improved varieties with optimized biofuel-related traits and tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses. Considering this, many studies have been carried out to generate genetic and genomic resources for sweet sorghum. In this review, we discuss various attributes of sweet sorghum that make it an ideal candidate for biofuel feedstock, and provide an overview of genetic diversity, tools, and resources available for engineering and/or marker-assisting breeding of sweet sorghum. Finally, the progress made so far, in identification of genes/quantitative trait loci (QTLs) important for agronomic traits and ongoing molecular breeding efforts to generate improved varieties, has been discussed.

/pdf/sweet-sorghum-as-biofuel-feedstock-recent-advances-and-3zm93oyvfs.pdf

Sweet sorghum as biofuel feedstock: recent advances and available resources

The world population has been galloping upwards at an unprecedented rate during the last 50 years. So far, the modern agricultural technology has enabled us to largely keep pace with the increasing human population through increased productivity of major crops. But in addition to causing environmental deterioration, it has also resulted in increasing losses by pests, pathogens and weeds. There is however a paucity of reliable data on the extent of food losses caused by these biotic agents, especially in the developing countries. The limited data available indicate that arthropods may be destroying an estimated 18–20% of the annual crop production worldwide estimated at a value of more than US$470 billion. Further, the losses are considerably higher in the developing tropics of Asia and Africa, where most of the future increase in world population is expected during the next 50 years. There is an urgent need to precisely estimate the extent of food loss and waste at different stages from the agricultural fields to human consumption with emphasis on the developing countries. This is the necessary first step towards development of safe, economical and sustainable methods of pest management, as well as food security, for the future.

Insect Pests and Crop Losses

The green plants and insects represent the two dominant groups of living organisms on Earth. The green plants occupy the most capacious segment among all biological organisms, whereas the insects are the most specious group. These two ‘empires’ are interconnected as well as interdependent. Green plants are the primary producers of food, and all animals being heterotrophs depend directly or indirectly on plant-produced food. In turn, nearly three fourths of all angiosperms require the services of insect pollinators. The entomophilic flowering plants and their insect pollinators thus represent the most evident and widely applicable example of mutualism among living organisms. But a wide variety of phytophagous insects also flourishes, diversifies and sustains on these plants. Consequently, the plants have evolved a dizzying array of morphological and biochemical (constitutive as well as induced) barriers for protection against insects and other herbivores. Evolutionary interactions between plants and insects may have contributed to the increased biodiversity and success of both these groups. The study of these interrelationships, as outlined in this chapter, is of great practical significance for the future agricultural production. The development of pest-resistant cultivars of crop plants and progress in integrated pest management both require an intricate understanding of insect-plant relationships.

Breeding Insect Resistant Crops for Sustainable Agriculture

Nanocarrier-based delivery systems can be used to increase the safety and efficacy of active ingredients in medical, veterinary, or agricultural applications, particularly when such ingredients are unstable, sparingly soluble, or cause off-target effects. In this review, we highlight the diversity of nanocarrier materials and their key advantages compared to free active ingredients. We discuss current trends based on peer-reviewed research articles, patent applications, clinical trials, and the nanocarrier formulations already approved by regulatory bodies. Although most nanocarriers have been engineered to combat cancer, the number of formulations developed for other purposes is growing rapidly, especially those for the treatment of infectious diseases and parasites affecting humans, livestock, and companion animals. The regulation and prohibition of many pesticides have also fueled research to develop targeted pesticide delivery systems based on nanocarriers, which maximize efficacy while minimizing the environmental impact of agrochemicals.

Nanocarriers for the Delivery of Medical, Veterinary, and Agricultural Active Ingredients.

Seed treatment refers to the application of certain agents physical, chemical or biological to the seed prior to sowing in order to suppress, control or repel pathogens, insects and other pests that attack seeds, seedlings or plants and it ranges from a basic dressing to coating and pelleting. Introduction and ban of arsenic (used from 1740 until 1808) is the key milestones in the history of modern seed treatment till then a continuous research and advancement in this technology is going on. The technological advancement prepared a roadmap for refiningexisting seed treatment technologies and future work on technologies like fluid drilling as a way to sow germinated seeds where gel can also serve as a delivery system for other materials, seed priming advances the early phase of germination without redicle emergence. Another advanced technology, solid matrix priming (SMP) has been evaluated as a means to advances the germination of seeds and serve as a carrier for useful material too. Physical and biological seed treatments alone an alternative to chemicals or in combination with a chemical treatment are being used worldwide because of their environmental safety and socioeconomic aspects. Biological seed treatments are expected to be one of the fastest growing seed treatment sectors in the near future, in part because they are easier to register at Environment Protection Agency (EPA). Lack of awareness to seed treatments at farmerâ€™s level is one of the limiting factors in disease management and hence, efforts should be made at farmerâ€™s level to adopt the technology. Keeping the all above facts in mind, selected seed treatment technologies with their improvement and significance will be discussed in this review.

https://journals.ansfoundation.org/index.php/jans/article/download/641/598

Seed treatments for sustainable agriculture-A review

Research on the identification of sources of resistance to insect pests of sorghum (i.e.cytoplasmic male sterile lines and wild relatives), and on the improvement and induction of insect pest resistance in sorghum by marker-assisted selection and genetic engineering is summarized. Future prospects are mentioned.

/pdf/host-plant-resistance-to-insects-in-sorghum-present-status-14lofd1whf.pdf

Host plant resistance to insects in sorghum: present status and need for future research

Agriculture and energy have always been linked closely, but the strength of the relationship has significantly increased in recent years Agriculture has always been a
source of fuels for energy production such as feed for draught animals and, more recently juice for biofuels, eg, bioethanol (blended with fossil fuels) or biodieselEnergy supplied by fossil fuels is a major input into modern mechanized crop production Economic,
environmental and energy security concerns resulting from excessive reliance on fossil fuels like petroleum are forcing countries throughout the world over to shift to
alternatives like biofuels Since biofuels can be produced from a diverse set of crops, each country is adopting a strategy that exploits the comparative advantages it holds with respect to such crops For example, sugarcane and maize are the main feedstock for ethanol in Brazil and US respectively, while rapeseed in Europe, and palm oil in
Malaysia are the main feedstocks for biodiesel The Government of India (GoI) has formulated a national policy on biofuels aiming to achieve a target of 20% blending of
petrol and diesel by 2017 Besides reducing the dependence on imported fossil fuels, the policy aims to generate several other benefits like employment for the rural poor,
regeneration of wastelands, reduction of emissions resulting from energy use that can lead to positive economic and environmental consequences Similar, biofuel policies have also been formulated by several countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas (Parthasarathy and Bantilan 2007)

Sweet sorghum as a biofuel crop where are we now

Genetic enhancement of stress tolerance in chickpea: present status and future prospects

Image segmentation is one of the difficult research problems in the machine vision industry and pattern recognition. Thresholding is a simple but effective method to separate objects from the background. A commonly used method the Otsu method to improves the image segmentation effect obviously. It’s simpler and easier to implement. However it fails if the histogram is unimodal or close to unimodal. Under studying the principle of the Otsu method, an improved threshold image segmentation algorithm based on the Otsu method is developed. Because the optical threshold should near the cross where the object and the background intersect, the probability of occurrence at the threshold value should divide into two parts. Its half belongs to object and half belongs to background. Then we apply a new weight to the Otsu method, this weight can make sure that the result threshold value will always reside at the valley of the two peaks or at the bottom rim of a single peak. Moreover, it ensures that both the variance of .the object and the variance of the background keep away from the variance of the whole image. Keywords— image segmentation, Otsu method, threshold, histogram. Introduction In many applications of image processing, the gray levels of pixels belonging to the object are substantially different from the gray levels of the pixels belonging to the background. Thresholding then becomes a simple but effective tool to separate objects from the background. Thresholding technique has been widely used in machine vision Industry and image analysis. Over the years many image thresholding have been developed, the most often used method including: Minimum error thresholding, the Otsu method, Momentpreserving thresholding and so on. More recent studies about this subject can be found inSauvola and Pietikainen [12], and Sahoo [11] and so on. Otsu [10] proposed a dynamic thresholding selection method in 1979. This, in turn, fuelled interest in image-based texture synthesis algorithms. Such an algorithm should be able to take a sample of texture and generate an unlimited amount of image data which, while not exactly like the original, will be perceived by humans to be the same texture. There are however typical functions which are found in many computer vision systems. In image segmentation, the objects range from no defect, small defect, to large defect. International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) Vol. 1 Issue 6, August 2012 ISSN: 2278-0181

/pdf/an-improved-image-segmentation-algorithm-based-on-otsu-1wb12uqz2q.pdf

An Improved Image Segmentation Algorithm Based on Otsu Method

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

K.K. Sharma

Author Tools

Chat about Author