Genome-Wide Association Study in Arabidopsis thaliana of Natural Variation in Seed Oil Melting Point: A Widespread Adaptive Trait in Plants.

Seed oil melting point is an adaptive, quantitative trait determined by the relative proportions of the fatty acids that compose the oil. Micro- and macro-evolutionary evidence suggests selection has changed the melting point of seed oils to covary with germination temperatures because of a trade-off between total energy stores and the rate of energy acquisition during germination under competition. The seed oil compositions of 391 natural accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana, grown under common-garden conditions, were used to assess whether seed oil melting point within a species varied with germination temperature.

Genome-Wide Association Study of Arabidopsis thaliana Identifies Determinants of Natural Variation in Seed Oil Composition.

The renewable source of highly reduced carbon provided by plant triacylglycerols (TAGs) fills an ever increasing demand for food, biodiesel, and industrial chemicals. Each of these uses requires different compositions of fatty acid proportions in seed oils. Identifying the genes responsible for variation in seed oil composition in nature provides targets for bioengineering fatty acid proportions optimized for various industrial and nutrition goals.

Identifying structural variation in haploid microbial genomes from short-read resequencing data using breseq.

Background: Mutations that alter chromosomal structure play critical roles in evolution and disease, including in the origin of new lifestyles and pathogenic traits in microbes. Large-scale rearrangements in genomes are often mediated by recombination events involving new or existing copies of mobile genetic elements, recently duplicated genes, or other repetitive sequences. Most current software programs for predicting structural variation from short-read DNA resequencing data are intended primarily for use on human genomes.

Computational tests of a thermal cycling strategy to isolate more complex functional nucleic acid motifs from random sequence pools by in vitro selection.

The dual information-function nature of nucleic acids has been exploited in the laboratory to isolate novel receptors and catalysts from random DNA and RNA sequences by cycles of in vitro selection and amplification. This strategy is particularly effective because, unlike polypeptides with random amino acid sequences, nucleic acids with random base sequences are often capable of stably folding into defined three-dimensional structures. However, the pervasive base-pairing potential of nucleic acids is also known to lead to kinetic traps in their folding landscapes.