Volume 2 Issue 10, October 2016

Genome sequencing reveals similarities between rice grown by Maroon communities in Suriname and landraces from the Guinea Highlands of West Africa.

A new sequencing study in Arabidopsis lyrata permits comparison of imprinted genes with the closely related A. thaliana and furthers our understanding of both the proximate and ultimate causes of genomic imprinting.

A new study using sorghum demonstrates how breeders can efficiently mine genetic diversity from plant gene banks.

Extended growing seasons due to climate warming might counter rises in CO₂ by increasing photosynthesis. However, in eastern North America, earlier springs over 30 years have reduced nitrogen availability to forest trees by increasing demand, limiting carbon sequestration.

Invading plant species have direct and indirect effects on both native and other non-native species. This meta-analysis finds that while non-native plants negatively affect all their neighbours, they affect natives around twice as harshly as other non-natives.

New approaches to create site-specific gene replacements and insertions in plants have been developed based on intron-targeting CRISPR/Cas9. These approaches efficiently generate replacements and insertions at the OsEPSPS gene in rice, resulting in glyphosate-resistant plants.

Chlamydomonas reinhardtii possesses an atypical violaxanthin de-epoxidase, homologous to a bacterial enzyme rather than plant or algal enzymes with the same function. This illustrates an unexpected diversity of photoprotection mechanisms in the green lineage of photosynthetic organisms.

By examining imprinted gene expression and methylomes in Arabidopsis lyrata and A. thaliana, a study found that while imprinted genes are largely conserved between the species, different epigenetic mechanisms were employed to maintain the imprinted gene expression.

Small RNAs (sRNAs) expressed in plants that target the Dicer-like (DCLs) genes of a fungal pathogen are shown to effectively silence the fungal DCLs and reduce pathogenicity after being taken up, demonstrating fungus–plant sRNA trafficking and a new approach for fungus control.

Fungi are the most prevalent class of plant pathogens, causing many diseases in crops. The authors show that in order to fight against them, plants produce and export miRNAs to silence important fungal genes, reducing the pathogen's virulence.

A population genomics study reveals a high similarity between a New World landrace of African rice and an Ivory Coast landrace. Together with diaries from captains of slave ships, the evidence presented traces the ancestry of the New World rice to its African origin.

A proof-of-concept study developed and validated a high-accuracy model to predict traits based on genotypes using data from a set of sorghum accessions, demonstrating a global strategy to assess and utilize the valuable germplasms in gene banks.