DIVIS: a semantic DIstance to improve the VISualisation of heterogeneous phenotypic datasets.

Background: Thanks to the wider spread of high-throughput experimental techniques, biologists are accumulating large amounts of datasets which often mix quantitative and qualitative variables and are not always complete, in particular when they regard phenotypic traits. In order to get a first insight into these datasets and reduce the data matrices size scientists often rely on multivariate analysis techniques. However such approaches are not always easily practicable in particular when faced with mixed datasets.

Diversity and selection of the continuous-flowering gene, RoKSN, in rose.

Blooming seasonality is an important trait in ornamental plants and was selected by humans. Wild roses flower only in spring whereas most cultivated modern roses can flower continuously. This trait is explained by a mutation of a floral repressor gene, RoKSN, a TFL1 homologue.

Nineteenth century French rose (Rosa sp.) germplasm shows a shift over time from a European to an Asian genetic background.

Hybridization with introduced genetic resources is commonly practiced in ornamental plant breeding to introgress desired traits. The 19th century was a golden age for rose breeding in France. The objective here was to study the evolution of rose genetic diversity over this period, which included the introduction of Asian genotypes into Europe.

On the characterization of flowering curves using Gaussian mixture models.

In this paper, we develop a statistical methodology applied to the characterization of flowering curves using Gaussian mixture models. Our study relies on a set of rosebushes flowering data, and Gaussian mixture models are mainly used to quantify the reblooming properties of each one. In this regard, we also suggest our own selection criterion to take into account the lack of symmetry of most of the flowering curves.