The Evolution of Fungicide Resistance Resulting from Combinations of Foliar-Acting Systemic Seed Treatments and Foliar-Applied Fungicides: A Modeling Analysis.

For the treatment of foliar diseases of cereals, fungicides may be applied as foliar sprays or systemic seed treatments which are translocated to leaves. Little research has been done to assess the resistance risks associated with foliar-acting systemic seed treatments when used alone or in combination with foliar sprays, even though both types of treatment may share the same mode of action. It is therefore unknown to what extent adding a systemic seed treatment to a foliar spray programme poses an additional resistance risk and whether in the presence of a seed treatment additional resistance management strategies (such as limiting the total number of treatments) are necessary to limit the evolution of fungicide-resistance.

Archaeogenomic insights into the adaptation of plants to the human environment: pushing plant-hominin co-evolution back to the Pliocene.

The colonization of the human environment by plants, and the consequent evolution of domesticated forms is increasingly being viewed as a co-evolutionary plant-human process that occurred over a long time period, with evidence for the co-evolutionary relationship between plants and humans reaching ever deeper into the hominin past. This developing view is characterized by a change in emphasis on the drivers of evolution in the case of plants. Rather than individual species being passive recipients of artificial selection pressures and ultimately becoming domesticates, entire plant communities adapted to the human environment.

Surprisingly Low Limits of Selection in Plant Domestication.

Current debate concerns the pace at which domesticated plants emerged from cultivated wild populations and how many genes were involved. Using an individual-based model, based on the assumptions of Haldane and Maynard Smith, respectively, we estimate that a surprisingly low number of 50-100 loci are the most that could be under selection in a cultivation regime at the selection strengths observed in the archaeological record. This finding is robust to attempts to rescue populations from extinction through selection from high standing genetic variation, gene flow, and the Maynard Smith-based model of threshold selection.

Using archaeogenomic and computational approaches to unravel the history of local adaptation in crops.

Our understanding of the evolution of domestication has changed radically in the past 10 years, from a relatively simplistic rapid origin scenario to a protracted complex process in which plants adapted to the human environment. The adaptation of plants continued as the human environment changed with the expansion of agriculture from its centres of origin. Using archaeogenomics and computational models, we can observe genome evolution directly and understand how plants adapted to the human environment and the regional conditions to which agriculture expanded.

Systems Modeling at Multiple Levels of Regulation: Linking Systems and Genetic Networks to Spatially Explicit Plant Populations.

Selection and adaptation of individuals to their underlying environments are highly dynamical processes, encompassing interactions between the individual and its seasonally changing environment, synergistic or antagonistic interactions between individuals and interactions amongst the regulatory genes within the individual. Plants are useful organisms to study within systems modeling because their sedentary nature simplifies interactions between individuals and the environment, and many important plant processes such as germination or flowering are dependent on annual cycles which can be disrupted by climate behavior. Sedentism makes plants relevant candidates for spatially explicit modeling that is tied in with dynamical environments.

MCMC-ODPR: primer design optimization using Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling.

Background: Next generation sequencing technologies often require numerous primer designs that require good target coverage that can be financially costly. We aimed to develop a system that would implement primer reuse to design degenerate primers that could be designed around SNPs, thus find the fewest necessary primers and the lowest cost whilst maintaining an acceptable coverage and provide a cost effective solution. We have implemented Metropolis-Hastings Markov Chain Monte Carlo for optimizing primer reuse.

The limits of mean-field heterozygosity estimates under spatial extension in simulated plant populations.

Computational models of evolutionary processes are increasingly required to incorporate multiple and diverse sources of data. A popular feature to include in population genetics models is spatial extension, which reflects more accurately natural populations than does a mean field approach. However, such models necessarily violate the mean field assumptions of classical population genetics, as do natural populations in the real world.

Archaeogenomic evidence of punctuated genome evolution in Gossypium.

Transposable elements (TEs) are drivers of evolution resulting in episodic surges of genetic innovation and genomic reorganization (Oliver KR, Greene WK. 2009. TEs: powerful facilitators of evolution.