Plant breeding articles from across Nature Portfolio

An ongoing effort aims to transform the clonally propagated tetraploid potato to a seed-propagated diploid crop, but our understanding of it disomic inheritance is limited. Here, the authors report genetic basis of heterosis in the elite hybrid potato and identify a male fertility-related PME gene with dominance heterotic effect.

Introgression of a 1-kb transposon regulating the expression of Al-tolerance gene, HvAACT1, significantly boosts the grain yield of an elite malting barley cultivar grown on acidic soil.

Genomic and phenotypic screening of the A. E. Watkins landrace wheat collection identifies beneficial novel haplotypes demonstrated to improve modern wheat without negative linkage drag or pleiotropy.

Characterization of Rmg8, the major resistance gene for wheat blast found in common wheat, brought a surprise: it is a variant of Pm4, a resistance gene for powdery mildew disease. Both genes recognize the AVR-Rmg8 gene of the wheat blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae pathotype Triticum (MoT), which results in resistance against this pathogen. This discovery opens avenues for developing wheat varieties to combat wheat blast disease.

Hybrid seed production is a labour-intensive manual process that limits fully mechanized hybrid rice breeding. We identify GSE3 as a gene that regulates grain size and demonstrate that fully mechanized hybrid seed production and increased seed number can be achieved using small-grain alleles of GSE3 in male sterile lines.

For a variety of reasons, genetic understanding of the steps leading to domestication of the nutrient-rich edible arrested inflorescence of cauliflower — its curd — has proven relatively intractable. A genomic study now unravels the details.

Many plant products eaten daily in human diets — such as potato or banana — are polyploid and are notoriously difficult to breed. In this study, the fusion of clonal gametes from distinct diploid tomato parents is used as a blueprint for the design of polyploid genomes in crops.