Application of a short term air quality action plan in Madrid (Spain) under a high-pollution episode - Part II: Assessment from multi-scale modelling.

Air pollution continues to be one of the main issues in urban areas. In addition to air quality plans and emission abatement policies, additional measures for high pollution episodes are needed to avoid exceedances of hourly limit values under unfavourable meteorological conditions such as the Madrid's short-term action NO protocol. In December 2016 there was a strong atmospheric stability episode that turned out in generalized high NO levels, causing the stage 3 of the NO protocol to be triggered for the first time in Madrid (29th December).

Characterization of Salt-Induced Epigenetic Segregation by Genome-Wide Loss of Heterozygosity and its Association with Salt Tolerance in Rice ( L.).

In a breeding effort to develop salt tolerant (ST) rice varieties by designed QTL pyramiding, large numbers of progenies derived from four crosses between salt- or drought- tolerant BCF IR64 introgression lines, were subjected to severe salt stress, resulting in 422 ST plants. The progeny testing of the selected F lines under more severe salt stress resulted in identification of 16 promising homozygous lines with high levels of ST. Genetic characterization of the 422 ST F progeny and 318 random F plants from the same four crosses using 105 segregating SSR markers lead to three interesting discoveries: (1) salt stress can induce genome-wide epigenetic segregation (ES) characterized by complete loss of heterozygosity (LOH) and nearly complete loss of an allele (LOA) in the F progenies of four rice populations in a single generation; (2) ∼25% of the stress-induced ES loci were transgenerational and inherited from their salt- and drought- selected parents; and (3) the salt-induced LOH and LOA loci (regions) appeared to contain genes/alleles associated with ST and/or drought tolerance.