A comprehensive survey of the plants that provide food, beverages, spices, and flavorings, this book will serve as an invaluable reference to gardeners, ethnobotanists, nutritionists, culinary professionals, dieticians, and food enthusiasts. This scientifically accurate guide will allow them to identify all the major plant-derived foods and flavors, research culinary uses, and understand their dietetic and nutritional properties. Introductory chapters cover the various categories of plant use, including cereals, pulses (legumes), nuts and seeds, fruits, vegetables, culinary herbs, sugar plants, beverages, spices, and flavorings. The core of the volume is an encyclopedic description of more than 350 food and flavor plants in use worldwide, with over 1000 color photographs. This accessible, pictorial guide is a concise source of practical information, not readily available elsewhere, and should be on every food enthusiast's bookshelf.

In the context of climate change, pollution and food safety, the current challenge is to enhance legumes production to sustain the growing population needs by 2050. This is a daunting task because abiotic and biotic stresses are threatening the growth, survival and productivity of legumes. For instance, the productivity of legumes is documented to be reduced by 14-88% by abiotic stresses. The co-occurrence of abiotic and biotic stresses under field conditions leads to interactive stress types, thus yielding positive or negative outcomes. Legumes react using antioxidant defense, osmoregulatory adjustments, hormonal regulations and molecular mechanisms to tolerate stress. Hence, improving legume productivity requires knowledge on the sensitivity, mechanisms and approaches of stress tolerance in legumes, in order to design new crops and alternative management systems. This book presents advances on bioactive compounds, applications, effect of various stresses and biotechnology-based stress tolerance mechanisms of legumes. This is our second volume on Legume Agriculture and Biotechnology, published in the series Sustainable Agriculture Reviews.

Annotation. Worldwide climatic changes have been raising concerns about potential changes to crop yields and production systems. Such concerns include the ability to accommodate these uncertain effects in order to ensure an adequate food supply for an increasing population. Written by leadinginternational experts, this book is the first comprehensive examination of the potential effects climate change, particularly green house gases, will have on agroecosystems. It also reviews the effects such systems have on climate change itself.

Ethnobotany: A Phytochemical Perspective explores the chemistry behind hundreds of plant medicines, dyes, fibers, flavors, poisons, insect repellants, and many other uses of botanicals. Bridging the gap between ethnobotany and chemistry, this book presents an introduction to botany, ethnobotany, and phytochemistry to clearly join these fields of study and highlight their importance in the discovery of botanical uses in modern industry and research. Part I. Ethnobotany, explores the history of plant exploration, current issues such as conservation and intellectual property rights, and a review of plant anatomy. An extensive section on plant taxonomy highlights particularly influential and economically important plants from across the plant kingdom. Part II. Phytochemistry, provides fundamentals of secondary metabolism, includes line drawings of biosynthetic pathways and chemical structures, and describes traditional and modern methods of plant extraction and analysis. The last section is devoted to the history of native plants and people and case studies on plants that changed the course of human history from five geographical regions: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Ocean. Throughout the entire book, vivid color photographs bring science to life, capturing the essence of human botanical knowledge and the beauty of the plant kingdom.

Covering the whole range of molecular biology techniques - genetic engineering as well as cytogenetics of plants -, each chapter begins with an introduction to the basic approach. followed by detailed methods with easy-to-follow protocols and comprehensive troubleshooting. The first part introduces basic molecular methodology such as DNA extraction, blotting, production of libraries and RNA cloning, while the second part describes analytical approaches, in particular RAPD and RFLP. The manual concludes with a variety of gene transfer techniques and both molecular and cytological analysis. As such, this will be of great use to both the first-timer and the experienced scientist.

Diversity and productivity of tropical legumes. Composition and nutritional attributes of pasture legumes. Composition and nutritive value of browse legumes. Composition of legumes grains. Anti-nutritional factors in forage legumes. Anti-nutritional substances in legumes seeds. Intake of tropical legumes. Tropical legumes for large ruminants. Tropical legumes for small ruminants. Leguminous leaf meals in non-ruminant nutrition.

Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 45 Series editor: John Alexander