Longer epidermal cells underlie a quantitative source of variation in wheat flag leaf size.

The wheat flag leaf is the main contributor of photosynthetic assimilates to developing grains. Understanding how canopy architecture strategies affect source strength and yield will aid improved crop design. We used an eight-founder population to investigate the genetic architecture of flag leaf area, length, width and angle in European wheat.

Implementing within-cross genomic prediction to reduce oat breeding costs.

A barrier to the adoption of genomic prediction in small breeding programs is the initial cost of genotyping material. Although decreasing, marker costs are usually higher than field trial costs. In this study we demonstrate the utility of stratifying a narrow-base biparental oat population genotyped with a modest number of markers to employ genomic prediction at early and later generations.

Genetic Characterization of a Wheat Association Mapping Panel Relevant to Brazilian Breeding Using a High-Density Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Array.

Bread wheat ( L.) is one of the world's most important crops. Maintaining wheat yield gains across all of its major production areas is a key target toward underpinning global food security.

Assessing European Wheat Sensitivities to Necrotrophic Effectors and Fine-Mapping the Locus Conferring Sensitivity to the Effector SnTox3.

is a necrotrophic fungal pathogen of wheat ( L.), one of the world's most important crops. mediates host cell death using proteinaceous necrotrophic effectors, presumably liberating nutrients that allow the infection process to continue.

Disorder in convergent floral nanostructures enhances signalling to bees.

Diverse forms of nanoscale architecture generate structural colour and perform signalling functions within and between species. Structural colour is the result of the interference of light from approximately regular periodic structures; some structural disorder is, however, inevitable in biological organisms. Is this disorder functional and subject to evolutionary selection, or is it simply an unavoidable outcome of biological developmental processes? Here we show that disordered nanostructures enable flowers to produce visual signals that are salient to bees.

Resolving Recent Plant Radiations: Power and Robustness of Genotyping-by-Sequencing.

Disentangling species boundaries and phylogenetic relationships within recent evolutionary radiations is a challenge due to the poor morphological differentiation and low genetic divergence between species, frequently accompanied by phenotypic convergence, interspecific gene flow and incomplete lineage sorting. Here we employed a genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) approach, in combination with morphometric analyses, to investigate a small western Mediterranean clade in the flowering plant genus Linaria that radiated in the Quaternary. After confirming the morphological and genetic distinctness of eight species, we evaluated the relative performances of concatenation and coalescent methods to resolve phylogenetic relationships.