Every year, mankind relies on the miraculous transformation of seeds into plants and back into seeds again. About 60% of all food crops are grown a new from seed each year, producing more than 2.3 billion tonnes of grain. Yet few people realize how fragile this transition from seed to seedling can be. To grow successfully seeds must germinate and seedlings emerge, quickly and uniformly throughout the field so that light, water and soil nutrients may be used with maximum efficiency

Plants and their products have been used in the treatment of infections since the beginning of human civilization. Although a number of antibiotics are widely used in medicine, the search for antimicrobial substances from plants is still in progress for better and safer drugs to combat bacterial and fungal infections. Atleast 1/5th of the world's population suffers from mycoses and newer preparation of antimycotic drugs are constantly being manufactured against dermatophytoses of human beings. Despite this, the incidence of dermatophytoses has increased during the past year. The old...

Biotechnology has achieved the rare feat of combining all living organism - plants, animals and microorganisms, into a single gene pool. Genes can now be transferred across phylogenetic boundaries giving man unlimited power to tailor them to his choice. This has made biotechnology indispensable in such diverse fields as industry, medicine, forestry, and environmental management. Yet we say that we have the technology to manipulate genes, we can engineer genes. True it is in very limited sense. This book is primarily aimed to cover information on principles, tools, techniques, and applications...