Immunomodulatory effect of sp. in mononuclear cells extracted from the blood of rheumatoid arthritis patients.

Background: Pathophysiological mechanisms of rheumatoid arthritis arise because of a proinflammatory environment, generated by the interaction of autoreactive lymphocytes and proinflammatory mediators. Current strategies to mitigate the progression of the disease produce adverse effects, so there is a need for new therapeutic strategies and molecular targets to treat this disease. In this context, evidence suggests that scorpion venoms could modulate the immune response and some important cellular mechanisms of pharmacological interest.

Fungal effectors: past, present, and future.

Fungal effector proteins function at the interfaces of diverse interactions between fungi and their plant and animal hosts, facilitating interactions that are pathogenic or mutualistic. Recent advancements in protein structure prediction have significantly accelerated the identification and functional predictions of these rapidly evolving effector proteins. This development enables scientists to generate testable hypotheses for functional validation using experimental approaches.

Comparative histology of abscission zones reveals the extent of convergence and divergence in seed shattering in weedy and cultivated rice.

The modification of seed shattering has been a recurring theme in rice evolution. The wild ancestor of cultivated rice disperses its seeds, but reduced shattering was selected during multiple domestication events to facilitate harvesting. Conversely, selection for increased shattering occurred during the evolution of weedy rice, a weed invading cultivated rice fields that has originated multiple times from domesticated ancestors.

Introgression from local cultivars is a driver of agricultural adaptation in Argentinian weedy rice.

Weedy rice, a pervasive and troublesome weed found across the globe, has often evolved through fertilization of rice cultivars with little importance of crop-weed gene flow. In Argentina, weedy rice has been reported as an important constraint since the early 1970s, and, in the last few years, strains with herbicide-resistance are suspected to evolve. Despite their importance, the origin and genetic composition of Argentinian weedy rice as well its adaptation to agricultural environments has not been explored so far.

A derived weedy rice × ancestral cultivar cross identifies evolutionarily relevant weediness QTLs.

Weedy rice (Oryza spp.) is a weedy relative of the cultivated rice that competes with the crop and causes significant production loss. The BHA (blackhull awned) US weedy rice group has evolved from aus cultivated rice and differs from its ancestors in several important weediness traits, including flowering time, plant height and seed shattering.

Variation in ripe fruit volatiles across the tomato clade: An evolutionary framework for studying fruit scent diversity in a crop wild relative.

Premise: The scents of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are an important component of ripe fleshy fruit attractiveness, yet their variation across closely related wild species is poorly understood. Phylogenetic patterns in these compounds and their biosynthetic pathways offer insight into the evolutionary drivers of fruit diversity, including whether scent can communicate an honest signal of nutrient content to animal dispersers. We assessed ripe fruit VOC content across the tomato clade (Solanum sect.

Unraveling the genetics of tomato fruit weight during crop domestication and diversification.

Six novel fruit weight QTLs were identified in tomato using multiple bi-parental populations developed from ancestral accessions. Beneficial alleles at these loci arose in semi-domesticated subpopulations and were likely left behind. This study paves the way to introgress these alleles into breeding programs.

Natural Genetic Diversity in Tomato Flavor Genes.

Fruit flavor is defined as the perception of the food by the olfactory and gustatory systems, and is one of the main determinants of fruit quality. Tomato flavor is largely determined by the balance of sugars, acids and volatile compounds. Several genes controlling the levels of these metabolites in tomato fruit have been cloned, including , , , , and .

Something old, something new: Evolution of Colombian weedy rice ( spp.) through de novo de-domestication, exotic gene flow, and hybridization.

Weedy rice ( spp.) is a worldwide weed of domesticated rice (), considered particularly problematic due to its strong competition with the crop, which leads to reduction in yields and harvest quality. Several studies have established multiple independent origins for weedy rice populations in the United States and various parts of Asia; however, the origins of weedy rice in South America have not been examined in a global context.

Major Impacts of Widespread Structural Variation on Gene Expression and Crop Improvement in Tomato.

Structural variants (SVs) underlie important crop improvement and domestication traits. However, resolving the extent, diversity, and quantitative impact of SVs has been challenging. We used long-read nanopore sequencing to capture 238,490 SVs in 100 diverse tomato lines.

Genomic Evidence for Complex Domestication History of the Cultivated Tomato in Latin America.

The process of plant domestication is often protracted, involving underexplored intermediate stages with important implications for the evolutionary trajectories of domestication traits. Previously, tomato domestication history has been thought to involve two major transitions: one from wild Solanum pimpinellifolium L. to a semidomesticated intermediate, S.

Considering weed management as a social dilemma bridges individual and collective interests.

Weeds pose severe threats to agricultural and natural landscapes worldwide. One major reason for the failure to effectively manage weeds at landscape scales is that current Best Management Practice guidelines, and research on how to improve such guidelines, focus too narrowly on property-level management decisions. Insufficiently considered are the aggregate effects of individual actions to determine landscape-scale outcomes, or whether there are collective practices that would improve weed management outcomes.

Call of the wild rice: shapes weedy rice evolution in Southeast Asia.

Agricultural weeds serve as productive models for studying the genetic basis of rapid adaptation, with weed-adaptive traits potentially evolving multiple times independently in geographically distinct but environmentally similar agroecosystems. Weedy relatives of domesticated crops can be especially interesting systems because of the potential for weed-adaptive alleles to originate through multiple mechanisms, including introgression from cultivated and/or wild relatives, standing genetic variation, and de novo mutations. Weedy rice populations have evolved multiple times through dedomestication from cultivated rice.

The Role of Standing Variation in the Evolution of Weedines Traits in South Asian Weedy Rice ( spp.).

Weedy rice ( spp.) is a problematic weed of cultivated rice () around the world. Recent studies have established multiple independent evolutionary origins of weedy rice, raising questions about the traits and genes that are essential for the evolution of this weed.

Extensive gene content variation in the Brachypodium distachyon pan-genome correlates with population structure.

While prokaryotic pan-genomes have been shown to contain many more genes than any individual organism, the prevalence and functional significance of differentially present genes in eukaryotes remains poorly understood. Whole-genome de novo assembly and annotation of 54 lines of the grass Brachypodium distachyon yield a pan-genome containing nearly twice the number of genes found in any individual genome. Genes present in all lines are enriched for essential biological functions, while genes present in only some lines are enriched for conditionally beneficial functions (e.

Signatures of adaptation in the weedy rice genome.

Crop domestication provided the calories that fueled the rise of civilization. For many crop species, domestication was accompanied by the evolution of weedy crop relatives, which aggressively outcompete crops and reduce harvests. Understanding the genetic mechanisms that underlie the evolution of weedy crop relatives is critical for agricultural weed management and food security.

All roads lead to weediness: Patterns of genomic divergence reveal extensive recurrent weedy rice origins from South Asian Oryza.

Weedy rice (Oryza spp.), a weedy relative of cultivated rice (O. sativa), infests and persists in cultivated rice fields worldwide.

Population Structure in the Model Grass Is Highly Correlated with Flowering Differences across Broad Geographic Areas.

The small, annual grass (L.) Beauv., a close relative of wheat ( L.

Little White Lies: Pericarp Color Provides Insights into the Origins and Evolution of Southeast Asian Weedy Rice.

Weedy rice is a conspecific form of cultivated rice (Oryza sativa L.) that infests rice fields and results in severe crop losses. Weed strains in different world regions appear to have originated multiple times from different domesticated and/or wild rice progenitors.

Impact of volunteer rice infestation on yield and grain quality of rice.

Background: Volunteer rice (Oryza sativa L.) grains may differ in physicochemical traits from cultivated rice, which may reduce the quality of harvested rice grain. To evaluate the effect of volunteer rice on cultivated rice, fields were surveyed in Arkansas in 2012.

Environmental niche variation and evolutionary diversification of the Brachypodium distachyon grass complex species in their native circum-Mediterranean range.

Unlabelled: •

Premise Of The Study: We conducted environmental niche modeling (ENM) of the Brachypodium distachyon s.l. complex, a model group of two diploid annual grasses (B.

More than one way to evolve a weed: parallel evolution of US weedy rice through independent genetic mechanisms.

Many different crop species were selected for a common suite of 'domestication traits', which facilitates their use for studies of parallel evolution. Within domesticated rice (Oryza sativa), there has also been independent evolution of weedy strains from different cultivated varieties. This makes it possible to examine the genetic basis of parallel weed evolution and the extent to which this process occurs through shared genetic mechanisms.