Introduction of J. Richard Seed, recipient of the 2002 Meritorious and Distinguished Service Award

Most plants are seed plants—characterized by seeds, pollen, and reduced gametophytes. Seed plants include gymnosperms and angiosperms.

Seedless Vascular Plants Were the First Tall Plants on Earth

The diverse plant life on Earth—consisting of nearly 400,000 species—can be divided into three broad categories based on biological characteristics: nonvascular, seedless vascular, and seed plants.

Seed structures are composed of a protective seed coat surrounding a plant embryo, and a food store for the developing embryo. The embryo contains the precursor tissues for leaves, stem, and roots. The endosperm and cotyledons—seed leaves—act as the food reserves for the growing embryo.

Rous Sarcoma virus or RSV was discovered by F. Peyton Rous in the year 1911 as a filterable transmissible agent that could cause tumors in chickens. He won a Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1966. His experiments clearly demonstrated that some cancers could be caused by infectious agents and led to the discovery of many more cancer-causing viruses in animals as well as humans.
RSV is a retrovirus that contains two copies of a plus-strand  RNA genome. Its genome consists of four main open...

Crop cultivation has a long history in human civilization, with records showing the cultivation of cereal plants beginning at around 8000 BC. This early plant breeding was developed primarily to provide a steady supply of food.