A major constraint on the production of high-quality grain around the world, pre-harvest sprouting in cereal crops causes substantial economic losses to producers and disrupts the processing, distribution, marketing, and storage of grain products. The solution to this problem must include a better understanding of the phenomenon, the development of

If I had to nominate an area of food production in which science has played a major role in addressing product quality to meet market needs I would not pass by the intimate rela tionship of cereaI chemistry with cereaI plant breeding programs. In Australia, cereaI chemistry and product quality labs ha ve long been associated with wheat and barley breeding programs. Grain quality characteristics have been principal factors determining registration of new cultivars. This has not been without pain in Australia. On the one hand some cultivars with promising yield and agronomic characteristics have been rejected on the basis of quality characteristics, and for a period our breeders imposed selection regimes based on yield which resulted in declining quality characteristics. In the end the market provides the critic al signals. For many years Australia held a commanding market position on the basis of a single quality image, initiaHy based on bulked wheat of fair/average quality (FAQ). Later this was improved by segregation into four broad classes* based around Australian Standard White (ASW). This is no longer a viable marketing strategy. We were probably a little slow in rec ognising the mosaic of present day wheat markets, but now have up to 18 different grades available. Around the world wheat is a grain with many end uses. Its use in bread is expanding.

This book summarizes the research done on preharvest sprouting during recent years. Naturally, whenever needed, earlier findings are also considered. Both publishers and the authors hope that his publication will provide researchers and students with a convenient source of up-to-date information in this expanding field.

The 13th International Conference on Plant Growth Substances was held from the 17th to the 26th July, 1988 in Calgary, Alberta Canada under the auspices of the IPGSA (International Plant Growth Substances Association) and the University of Calgary. Over 550 participants from allover the world attended, along with 70 Associates and 25 University of Calgary graduate students who assisted in audiovisual presentations when not attending the scientific sessions. Fine weather prevailed, as was usual for summer on the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies, and participants arriving early visited the famous Calgary Stampede. A hosted buffet opened the Conference on Sunday evening. On Wednesday evening, following an afternoon field trip into the mountains of the Kananaskis Valley, the IPGSA traditional banquet became a western barbecue on Richards' Ghost River Ranch in the foothills of the Rockies, with folk and country and western music provided by the Great Western Orchestra. The fine Alberta weather continued through the weekend, and the Conference ended with a field trip to Sun shine Meadows, a World Heritage Site in Banff National Park.

The symposium In the next decades, agriculture will have to cope with an ever-increasing demand for food and raw basic materials on the one hand, and with the necessity to use resources without further degrading or exhausting the environment on the other hand, and all this within a dynamic framework of social and economic conditions. Intensification, sustainability, optimizing scarce resources, and climate change are among the key issues. Organized thinking about future farming requires forecasting of consequences of alternative ways to farm and to develop agriculture. The complexity of the problems calls for a systematic approach in which many disciplines are integrated. Systems thinking and systems simulation are therefore indispensable tools for such endeavours. About 150 scientists and senior research leaders participated in the symposium 'Systems Approaches for Agricultural Development' (SAAD) at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok, Thailand, in December 1991. The symposium had the following objectives: - to review the status of systems research and modeling in agriculture, with special reference to evaluating their efficacy and efficiency in achieving research goals, and to their application in developing countries; - to promote international cooperation in modeling, and increase awareness of systems research and simulation. The symposium consisted of plenary sessions with reviews of major areas in systems approaches in agriculture, plus presentations in two concurrent sessions on technical topics of systems research. Subjects of studies were from tropical and temperate countries.

This text is intended for plant physiologists, molecular biologists, biochemists, biotechnologists, geneticists, horticulturalists, agromnomists and botanists, and upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in these disciplines. It integrates advances in the diverse and rapidly-expanding field of seed science, from ecological and demographic aspects of seed production, dispersal and germination, to the molecular biology of seed development. The book offers a broad, multidisciplinary approach that covers both theoretical and applied knowledge.