Kilicgun, Hasan; Goksen, Gulden; Olgun, Abdullah; Ercisli, Sezai

All living systems have the intrinsic ability to respond, to counteract and to adapt to the external and internal sources of disturbance. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of the iron chelating agent desferrioxamine (DF) and its dose combinations on heat stress in Caenorhabditis elegans (Nematodes). So, in this temperature dependent study, the protective effects of different concentrations of DF on heat stress were examined in Caenorhabditis elegans. Different concentrations of DF (100, 200, 400, 800 and 1600 μM ) were added to the food source and the worms L4 stage were transferred in these new plates. 100, 200, 400 and 800 μM DF treatment prolonged lifespan in animals grown at 35 °C. At tested concentrations, the lifespan increasing in Caenorhabditis elegans was significantly higher than lifespan in control group. On the other hand, no significant difference was observed between control group and 1600 μM DF upon lifespan in Caenorhabditis elegans. This study indicated that in the temperature and concentration dependent experiments DF has an effect of lifespan in C. elegans.

Osma, Etem; Ozyigit, Ibrahim Ilker; Leblebici, Zeliha; Demir, Goksel; Serin, Memduh

In this study, washed and unwashed tomato fruits (Lycopersicon esculentum Miller) were collected from six different station types such as; brook coast, suburban area, industrial area, inner city, roadside and village (control) in Istanbul-Turkey, in 2009. Unwashed and washed fruit samples were used to analyze cadmium, chromium, copper, iron, nickel, lead and zinc concentrations by using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry. It was observed that washing procedure reduced concentrations of all heavy metals related to station types. In accordance with the results, the lowest and highest heavy metal accumulations measured in fruits were as follows; cadmium (0.17-0.40 μg/g dw), chrome (0.94-5.67 μg/g dw), copper (7.67-14.27 μg/g dw), iron (19.16-64.53 μg/g dw), nickel (1.02-11.64 μg/g dw), lead (4.31-5.51 μg/g dw) and zinc (1.36-3.07 μg/g dw). As a result, the relative abundance of heavy metals in tomato samples were observed as iron>copper>nickel>chrome>lead>zinc>cadmium. According to the results of this study, it can be said that tomato fruits reflect heavy metal amounts well in polluted areas such as urban, industrial and roadside when compared to unpolluted (control) areas with their washed and unwashed samples.

Agar, Guleray; Aksakal, Ozkan; Bozari, Sedat; Sunar, Serap; Erturk, Filiz Aygun; Yildirim, Nalan; Sevsay, Sevgi

The present study employed FAMEs and RAPD to investigate the patterns of biochemical and genetic variation among and within three different populations of Vicia canescens L. Fourteen primers were used for the RAPD and polymorphic bands were obtained with eight primers. Biochemical and genetic distances were calculated and dendrograms were obtained for all studied populations using both RAPD and FAMEs methods. The results of our RAPD analysis suggest that the highest percentage of polymorphic loci (63.7%) was recorded in pine population, which was followed by the campus (60.8%) and colonizing (43.1%) populations. A UPGMA analysis was carried out using Jaccard's index of similarity for 45 individuals in the three populations, which produced a dendrogram. The index revealed that the campus and colonizing populations are the closest ones, while pine and campus populations are the farthest.