Ovidiu Constantinescu (1933 – January 23, 2012) was a Romanian mycologist known for his work on the taxonomy of the Peronosporales.
Ovidiu Constantinescu (1933 – January 23, 2012) was a Romanian mycologist known for his work on the taxonomy of the Peronosporales.
Constantinescu was born in Constanța in 1933. He first graduated military school before ultimately enrolling at the Biological Institute at the University of Bucharest in 1949. [1] Traian Săvulescu, founder of the institute, and his wife Alice advised Constantinescu while he was a student. Constantinescu graduated in 1970 from the institute. Following his thesis defense, he remained at the Institute as an assistant as well as the curator of the Mycological Herbarium there. [1] Between 1976 and 1981 he edited the famous exsiccata Herbarium mycologicum Romanicum, at first with V. Bontea and later with G. Negrean. [2] In 1974, Constantinescu published a book, Metode și tehnici în micologie, which was his first book on methods in mycology. [3] Although it was never translated from Romanian, for its time it was widely recognized as one of the best mycological methods books. [4] After working for one year in 1982 at the Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures in Baarn, Netherlands, he moved to Sweden in 1984. He was hired at the Institute for Systematic Botany at the University of Uppsala. Because of his vast knowledge and expertise about members of the order Peronosporales, he began the university's culture collection, known as Mykoteket. Constantinescu dedicated the next 20 years building up the collection for the university. He remained in Sweden at Uppsala University for the rest of his life working on members of the family Peronosporaceae, describing six new genera to add to the family after none had been added for over 30 years. [1] He compiled and published an annotated list of over 500 species in the genus Peronospora in 1991. [4] He is also known for describing new species of and working on downy mildew pathogens. [5]
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to the east, and the Black Sea to the southeast. It has a predominantly continental climate, and an area of 238,397 km2 (92,046 sq mi) with a population of 19 million people (2023). Romania is the twelfth-largest country in Europe and the sixth-most populous member state of the European Union. Its capital and largest city is Bucharest, followed by Cluj-Napoca, Iași, Timișoara, Constanța, Craiova, Brașov, and Galați.
Myrrha, also known as Smyrna, is the mother of Adonis in Greek mythology. She was transformed into a myrrh tree after having intercourse with her father, and gave birth to Adonis in tree form. Although the tale of Adonis has Semitic roots, it is uncertain where the myth of Myrrha emerged from, though it was probably from Cyprus.
The Oomycetes, or Oomycota, form a distinct phylogenetic lineage of fungus-like eukaryotic microorganisms within the Stramenopiles. They are filamentous and heterotrophic, and can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Sexual reproduction of an oospore is the result of contact between hyphae of male antheridia and female oogonia; these spores can overwinter and are known as resting spores. Asexual reproduction involves the formation of chlamydospores and sporangia, producing motile zoospores. Oomycetes occupy both saprophytic and pathogenic lifestyles, and include some of the most notorious pathogens of plants, causing devastating diseases such as late blight of potato and sudden oak death. One oomycete, the mycoparasite Pythium oligandrum, is used for biocontrol, attacking plant pathogenic fungi. The oomycetes are also often referred to as water molds, although the water-preferring nature which led to that name is not true of most species, which are terrestrial pathogens.
Papaver somniferum, commonly known as the opium poppy or breadseed poppy, is a species of flowering plant in the family Papaveraceae. It is the species of plant from which both opium and poppy seeds are derived and is also a valuable ornamental plant grown in gardens. Its native range was east of the Mediterranean Sea, but has since been obscured and vastly expanded by introduction and cultivation from ancient times to the present day, being naturalized across much of Europe and Asia.
Hyaloperonospora is a genus of oomycete, obligate, plant pathogens that was originally considered to be part of Peronospora. Species in this group produce a disease called downy mildew and can infect many important crops. From the 19 downy mildew producing genera, Hyaloperonospora has been grouped with Perofascia in the brassicolous downy mildews. In the group of downy mildews, Hyaloperonospora is the third biggest genus. The most famous species in the genus is the Hyaloperonospora parasitica, or also known as Hyaloperonospora arabidopsis. This species has become a model organism from its ability to infect the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. It is used to study plant-pathogen interactions, and is currently the only Hyaloperonospora species that has an assembled genome.
Plasmopara obducens is a species of oomycete that causes Impatiens downy mildew. It was first described on Impatiens noli-tangere in Germany in 1877. Plasmopara obducens is known from native species of Impatiens since the 1800s, but outbreaks on cultivated varieties of Impatiens walleriana started in 2003 in the United Kingdom and in 2004 in the United States. The outbreak spread worldwide by 2016.
Plasmopara viticola, the causal agent of grapevine downy mildew, is a heterothallic oomycete that overwinters as oospores in leaf litter and soil. In the spring, oospores germinate to produce macrosporangia, which under wet condition release zoospores. Zoospores are splashed by rain into the canopy, where they swim to and infect through stomata. After 7–10 days, yellow lesions appear on foliage. During favorable weather the lesions sporulate and new secondary infections occur.
Robert Lee Gilbertson was a distinguished American mycologist and educator. He was a faculty member at University of Arizona for 26 years until his retirement from teaching in 1995; he was a Professor Emeritus at U of A until his death on October 26, 2011, in Tucson, Arizona. 2011. He held concurrent positions as Plant Pathologist, Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Arizona (1967–95) for a project Research on wood-rotting fungi and other fungi associated with southwestern plants and was collaborator and consultant with Center for Forest Mycology Research, US Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin (1957–1981).
Kálmán Géza Vánky was a Hungarian mycologist with Swedish and Hungarian citizenship, who lived in Germany. He was considered to be the worldwide authority on the subject of smut fungi and has dominated the taxonomic study of Ustilaginomycetes for at least the past four decades.
Giovanni Battista Traverso (1878-1959) was a mycologist and plant pathologist on the early 20th-century.
Traian Săvulescu was a Romanian biologist and botanist, founder of the Romanian School of Phytopathology, member and president of the Romanian Academy.
Barbu Lăzăreanu was a Romanian literary historian, bibliographer, and left-wing activist. Of Romanian Jewish background, he became noted for both his social criticism and his lyrical pieces while still in high school, subsequently developing as a satirist and printing his own humorous magazine, Țivil-Cazon. Lăzăreanu's youthful sympathies veered toward the anarchist underground, prompting him to associate with Panait Mușoiu. At that stage of his life, he participated in a bakers' strike, and encouraged peasants to resist encroachment by the landowners.
Nicolae Crevedia was a Romanian journalist, poet and novelist, father of the writer-politician Eugen Barbu. Of Muntenian peasant roots, which shaped his commitment to agrarian and then far-right politics, as well as his dialectal poetry and humorous prose, he preferred bohemian life to an academic career. As a writer at Gândirea, Crevedia became a follower of Nichifor Crainic, and worked with him on various other press venues, from Calendarul to Sfarmă-Piatră. His poetic output and his political outlook were both nominally influenced by his peasant background; in practice, however, he gave literary expression to the suburban environment, and adored the modernist poetry of Tudor Arghezi.
Paul Bujor was a Romanian zoologist, physiologist and marine biologist, also noted as a socialist writer and politician. Hailing from rural Covurlui County, he studied biology in France and Switzerland, where he was attracted by left-wing ideas; his evolutionary biology, informed by the work of Carl Vogt, veered into Marxism and irreligion. Returning to the Kingdom of Romania, he was a junior member of the Romanian Social Democratic Workers' Party, active on its moderate wing. He earned the critics' attention in the 1890s as a short story writer with a socialist and pacifist message, but only returned to fiction writing briefly, in the 1930s. An award-winning ichthyologist, Bujor was hired by the University of Iași, where he taught for 41 years, and throughout the period worked on documenting the Black Sea fauna, and made discoveries concerning the environment of Techirghiol Lake. He inaugurated the Romanian study of animal morphology, while also contributing to histology, embryology, and parasitology, and gave popular lectures on evolution and physical culture.
Pietro Romualdo Pirotta was an Italian professor of botany. He was made Knight of the Crown of Italy.
Gregor Hagedorn is a German botanist and academic director at the Natural History Museum, Berlin.
The Alliance for the Union of Romanians is a right-wing populist and nationalist political party active in Romania and Moldova. It was founded on 19 September 2019 ahead of the 2020 Romanian local and legislative elections. The party president is George Simion. The party ran in the local elections, not obtaining many votes and only winning in three towns. However, in the legislative elections, the AUR won 9% of the votes in all of Romania and its diaspora, thus becoming the fourth-largest party in the country at the central level, which surprised observers.
Antonín (Toni) Vězda was a Czech lichenologist. After completing a university education that was postponed by World War II, Vězda taught botany at the Czech University of Life Sciences. In 1958, he was dismissed from his university position as a result of the restrictions placed on academic freedoms by the communist regime in power. He eventually was hired as a lichen researcher by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, who allowed him to work from his apartment, which served also as an office and herbarium.
Ștefan Buchiu is a Romanian Orthodox cleric and theologian known for his work in Orthodox dogmatic theology. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Orthodox Theology and currently serves as an Honorary Diocesan Vicar at the Archdiocese of Bucharest within the Romanian Orthodox Church. He served as the dean of this faculty from 2008 to 2018.
