Sora (bird) Soras often eat the seeds of plants, such as smartweeds, bulrushes, sedges, and barnyard grasses. Seeds of annual wildrice ("Zizania aquatica") and rice cutgrass are eaten by soras in the eastern United States. A literature review lists crowngrass ("Paspalum" spp.) and rice ("Oryza sativa") as relatively important food sources for soras in the Southeast. Plants comprising <5% of the sora's diet are also listed and include spikerushes ("Eleocharis" spp.), duckweeds (Lemnaceae), pondweeds ("Potamogeton" spp.), panicgrasses ("Panicum" spp.), cordgrasses ("Spartina" spp.), and saltgrass ("Distichlis spicata"). Soras eat more plant food in fall and winter (68%–69%) than in spring and summer (40%).
Helitron (biology) Helitron (biology) Helitrons are one of the three groups of eukaryotic class 2 transposable elements (TEs) so far described. They are the eukaryotic rolling-circle transposable elements which are hypothesized to transpose by a rolling circle replication mechanism via a single-stranded DNA intermediate. They were first discovered in plants ("Arabidopsis thaliana" and "Oryza sativa") and in the nematode "Caenorhabditis elegans", and now they have been identified in a diverse range of species, from protists to mammals. Helitrons make up a substantial fraction of many genomes where non-autonomous elements frequently outnumber the putative autonomous partner. Helitrons seem to have a major role