Ensembl (www.ensembl.org) is an open platform integrating publicly available genomics data across the tree of life with a focus on eukaryotic species related to human health, agriculture and biodiversity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGrasspea (Lathyrus sativus L.) is an underutilised but promising legume crop with tolerance to a wide range of abiotic and biotic stress factors, and potential for climate-resilient agriculture. Despite a long history and wide geographical distribution of cultivation, only limited breeding resources are available.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examined the molecular basis of triazole resistance in Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici (wheat mildew, Bgt), a model organism among powdery mildews.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlants, as sessile organisms, deploy transcriptional dynamics for adapting to extreme growth conditions such as cold stress. Emerging evidence suggests that chromatin architecture contributes to transcriptional regulation. However, the relationship between chromatin architectural dynamics and transcriptional reprogramming in response to cold stress remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTenA thiamin-degrading enzymes are commonly found in prokaryotes, plants, fungi and algae and are involved in the thiamin salvage pathway. The gut symbiont Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron (Bt) produces a TenA protein (BtTenA) which is packaged into its extracellular vesicles. An alignment of BtTenA protein sequence with proteins from different databases using the basic local alignment search tool (BLAST) and the generation of a phylogenetic tree revealed that BtTenA is related to TenA-like proteins not only found in a small number of intestinal bacterial species but also in some aquatic bacteria, aquatic invertebrates, and freshwater fish.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGrass pea (Lathyrus sativus L.) is a rich source of protein cultivated as an insurance crop in Ethiopia, Eritrea, India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Its resilience to both drought and flooding makes it a promising crop for ensuring food security in a changing climate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNucleotide composition is suggested to infer gene functionality and ecological adaptation of species to distinct environments. However, the underlying biological function of nucleotide composition dictating environmental adaptations is largely unknown. Here, we systematically analyze the nucleotide composition of transcriptomes across 1000 plants (1KP) and their corresponding habitats.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCellular RNAs are heterogeneous with respect to their alternative processing and secondary structures, but the functional importance of this complexity is still poorly understood. A set of alternatively processed antisense non-coding transcripts, which are collectively called COOLAIR, are generated at the Arabidopsis floral-repressor locus FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC). Different isoforms of COOLAIR influence FLC transcriptional output in warm and cold conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiparental recombinant inbred line (RIL) populations are sets of genetically stable lines and have a simple population structure that facilitates the dissection of the genetics of interesting traits. On the other hand, populations derived from multiparent intercrosses combine both greater diversity and higher numbers of recombination events than RILs. Here, we describe a simple population structure: a three-way recombinant inbred population combination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Polyploidy, especially allopolyploidy, which entails merging divergent genomes via hybridization and whole-genome duplication (WGD), is a major route to speciation in plants. The duplication among the parental genomes (subgenomes) often leads to one subgenome becoming dominant over the other(s), resulting in subgenome asymmetry in gene content and expression. Polyploid wheats are allopolyploids with most genes present in two (tetraploid) or three (hexaploid) functional copies, which commonly show subgenome expression asymmetry.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAgricultural soil harbors a diverse microbiome that can form beneficial relationships with plants, including the inhibition of plant pathogens. spp. are one of the most abundant bacterial genera in the soil and rhizosphere and play important roles in promoting plant health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRice blast is a devastating disease caused by the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae that threatens rice production around the world. The fungus produces a specialized infection cell, called the appressorium, that enables penetration through the plant cell wall in response to surface signals from the rice leaf. The underlying biology of plant infection, including the regulation of appressorium formation, is not completely understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFis an obligate biotrophic fungal pathogen that causes orange rust of sugarcane, which is prevalent in many countries around the globe. In the United States, orange rust was first detected in sugarcane in Florida in 2007 and poses a persistent and economically damaging threat to the sugarcane industry in this region. Here, we generated the first genome assemblies for two isolates of (1040 and 2143) collected in Florida in 2017 from two sugarcane cultivars, CL85-1040 and CP89-2143, respectively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: mRNA processing is critical for gene expression. A challenge in regulating mRNA processing is how to recognize the actual mRNA processing sites, such as splice and polyadenylation sites, when the sequence content is insufficient for this purpose. Previous studies suggested that RNA structure affects mRNA processing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNumerous examples of biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs), including for compounds of agricultural and medicinal importance, have now been discovered in plant genomes. However, little is known about how these complex traits are assembled and diversified. Here, we examine a large number of variants within and between species for a paradigm BGC (the thalianol cluster), which has evolved recently in a common ancestor of the Arabidopsis genus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Guanine-rich sequences are able to form complex RNA structures termed RNA G-quadruplexes in vitro. Because of their high stability, RNA G-quadruplexes are proposed to exist in vivo and are suggested to be associated with important biological relevance. However, there is a lack of direct evidence for RNA G-quadruplex formation in living eukaryotic cells.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicroRNA (miRNA)-mediated cleavage is involved in numerous essential cellular pathways. miRNAs recognize target RNAs via sequence complementarity. In addition to complementarity, in vitro and in silico studies have suggested that RNA structure may influence the accessibility of mRNAs to miRNA-induced silencing complexes (miRISCs), thereby affecting RNA silencing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe use of potential biostimulants is of broad interest in plant science for improving yields. The application of a humic derivative called fulvic acid (FA) may improve forage crop production. FA is an uncharacterized mixture of chemicals and, although it has been reported to increase growth parameters in many species including legumes, its mode of action remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe explore sequence determinants of enzyme activity and specificity in a major enzyme family of terpene synthases. Most enzymes in this family catalyze reactions that produce cyclic terpenes-complex hydrocarbons widely used by plants and insects in diverse biological processes such as defense, communication, and symbiosis. To analyze the molecular mechanisms of emergence of terpene cyclization, we have carried out in-depth examination of mutational space around (E)-β-farnesene synthase, an Artemisia annua enzyme which catalyzes production of a linear hydrocarbon chain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe influence of wheat (modern wheat, both bread and pasta, their wild ancestors and synthetic hybrids) on the microbiota of their roots and surrounding soil is characterized. We isolated lines of bread wheat by hybridizing diploid () with tetraploid and crossed it with a modern cultivar of . The newly created, synthetic hybrid wheat, which recapitulate the breeding history of wheat through artificial selection, is found to support a microbiome enriched in beneficial Glomeromycetes fungi, but also in, potentially detrimental, Nematoda.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlants produce an array of natural products with important ecological functions. These compounds are often decorated with oligosaccharide groups that influence bioactivity, but the biosynthesis of such sugar chains is not well understood. Triterpene glycosides (saponins) are a large family of plant natural products that determine important agronomic traits, as exemplified by avenacins, antimicrobial defense compounds produced by oats.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF