The climate crisis impairs yield and quality of crucial crops like potatoes. We investigated the effects of heat stress on five morpho-physiological parameters in a diverse panel of 178 potato cultivars under glasshouse conditions. Overall, heat stress increased shoot elongation and green fresh weight, but reduced tuber yield, starch content and harvest index.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNowadays, the study of the gait by analyzing the distribution of plantar pressure is a well-established technique. The use of intelligent insoles allows real-time monitoring of the user. Thus, collecting and analyzing information is a more accurate process than consultations in so-called gait laboratories.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: DNA methylation is thought to influence the expression of genes, especially in response to changing environmental conditions and developmental changes. Sugar beet (Beta vulgaris ssp. vulgaris), and other biennial or perennial plants are inevitably exposed to fluctuating temperatures throughout their lifecycle and might even require such stimulus to acquire floral competence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCassava storage roots are among the most important root crops worldwide, and represent one of the most consumed staple foods in sub-Saharan Africa. The vegetatively propagated tropical shrub can form many starchy tuberous roots from its stem. These storage roots are formed through the activation of secondary root growth processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Human malignant melanoma is a highly aggressive, heterogeneous and drug-resistant cancer. Due to a high number of clones, harboring various mutations that affect key pathways, there is an exceptional level of phenotypic variation and intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) in melanoma. This poses a significant challenge to personalized cancer medicine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring their first year of growth, overwintering biennial plants transport Suc through the phloem from photosynthetic source tissues to storage tissues. In their second year, they mobilize carbon from these storage tissues to fuel new growth and reproduction. However, both the mechanisms driving this shift and the link to reproductive growth remain unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Internet of Things enables experts of given domains to create smart user experiences for interacting with the environment. However, development of such experiences requires strong programming skills, which are challenging to develop for non-technical users. This paper presents several extensions to the block-based programming language used in App Inventor to make the creation of mobile apps for smart learning experiences less challenging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding tuberization in the major crop plant potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is of importance to secure yield even under changing environmental conditions. Tuber formation is controlled by a homolog of the floral inductor FLOWERING LOCUS T, referred to as SP6A.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFParasitism evokes adaptive physiological changes in the host, many of which take place through gene expression changes. This response can be more or less local, depending on the organ or tissue affected by the parasite, or else systemic when the parasite affects the entire host body. The most extreme of the latter cases is intragenomic parasitism, where the parasite is present in all host nuclei as any other genomic element.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor many years, parasitic B chromosomes have been considered genetically inert elements. Here we show the presence of ten protein-coding genes in the B chromosome of the grasshopper Eyprepocnemis plorans. Four of these genes (CIP2A, GTPB6, KIF20A, and MTG1) were complete in the B chromosome whereas the six remaining (CKAP2, CAP-G, HYI, MYCB2, SLIT and TOP2A) were truncated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
May 2015
Asexual reproduction is expected to reduce the adaptive potential to novel or changing environmental conditions, restricting or altering the ecological niche of asexual lineages. Asexual lineages of plants and animals are typically polyploid, an attribute that may influence their genetic variation, plasticity, adaptive potential, and niche breadth. The genus Boechera (Brassicaceae) represents an ideal model to test the relative ecological and biogeographic impacts of reproductive mode and ploidy because it is composed of diploid sexual and both diploid and polyploid asexual (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Aims: St. John's wort (Hypericum perforatum) is becoming an important model plant system for investigations into ecology, reproductive biology and pharmacology. This study investigates biogeographic variation for population genetic structure and reproduction in its ancestral (European) and introduced (North America) ranges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn asexual (apomictic) plants, the absence of meiosis and sex is expected to lead to mutation accumulation. To compare mutation accumulation in the transcribed genomic regions of sexual and apomictic plants, we performed a double-validated analysis of copy number variation (CNV) on 10 biological replicates each of diploid sexual and diploid apomictic Boechera, using a high-density (>700 K) custom microarray. The Boechera genome demonstrated higher levels of depleted CNV, compared with enriched CNV, irrespective of reproductive mode.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFApomixis (asexual seed production) is characterized by meiotically unreduced egg cell production (apomeiosis) followed by its parthenogenetic development into offspring that are genetic clones of the mother plant. Fertilization (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn apomictic Boechera spp., meiotic diplospory leads to the circumvention of meiosis and the suppression of recombination to produce unreduced male and female gametes (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFApomixis refers to plant asexual reproduction through seeds that give rise to progeny which are genotypically identical to the maternal parent. It has evolved from many different sexual taxa although the underlying genetic factors remain unknown. Previous analyses of the over-representation of transcription factors, in a comparison of microdissected ovules from apomictic and sexual Boechera, showed that many transcription factor mRNAs possessed microRNA (miRNAs) binding sites, thus pointing to miRNAs as potentially important factors that may be involved in the regulatory switch from sexual to apomictic reproduction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe objective of the present study is to report two cases of a rare entity, which is being increasingly recognized in recent years. A 35-year-old woman and a 33-year old man were incidentally discovered to have bilocular cystic hepatic masses affecting segment IV. In both cases the cystic mass was excised and the histopathological analysis revealed an inner lining of the cyst wall with a pseudostratified epithelium showing prominent cilia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Apomixis or asexual seed formation represents a potentially important agronomic trait whose introduction into crop plants could be an effective way to fix and perpetuate a desirable genotype through successive seed generations. However, the gene regulatory pathways underlying apomixis remain unknown. In particular, the potential function of microRNAs, which are known to play crucial roles in many aspects of plant growth and development, remains to be determined with regards to the switch from sexual to apomictic reproduction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Apomixis, a natural form of asexual seed production in plants, is considered to have great biotechnological potential for agriculture. It has been hypothesised that de-regulation of the sexual developmental pathway could trigger apomictic reproduction. The genus Boechera represents an interesting model system for understanding apomixis, having both sexual and apomictic genotypes at the diploid level.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPremise Of The Study: Microsatellite markers were developed to study the origins and evolution of apomictic Hypericum perforatum, a polyploid invasive perennial herb indigenous to Europe that produces compounds of medicinal/pharmaceutical importance.
Methods And Results: Eleven primer sets were developed using a non-radioactive protocol. All loci were polymorphic, showing from 2 to 9 alleles per locus.
A recent reinvestigation of aerial parts of Wedelia paludosa D.C. is described and reports, for the first time, the isolation of iso-kaurenoic acid from this species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe have compared the transcriptomic profiles of microdissected live ovules at four developmental stages between a diploid sexual and diploid apomictic Boechera. We sequenced >2 million SuperSAGE tags and identified (1) heterochronic tags (n = 595) that demonstrated significantly different patterns of expression between sexual and apomictic ovules across all developmental stages, (2) stage-specific tags (n = 577) that were found in a single developmental stage and differentially expressed between the sexual and apomictic ovules, and (3) sex-specific (n = 237) and apomixis-specific (n = 1106) tags that were found in all four developmental stages but in only one reproductive mode. Most heterochronic and stage-specific tags were significantly downregulated during early apomictic ovule development, and 110 were associated with reproduction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present article introduces SYLLABARIUM, a new Web tool addressing the needs of linguists, psycholinguists, and cognitive scientists who work with Spanish and/or Basque and are interested in retrieving information about several syllable-related parameters. This new online syllabic database allows the user to generate complete lists of Spanish and Basque syllables with information about the syllable frequency. Among other measures, for a given orthographic syllable, SYLLABARIUM provides its number of occurrences (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeveral series of nonlactonic podophyllic aldehyde analogues were prepared and evaluated against several human tumor cell lines. They had different combinations of aldehyde, imine, amine, ester, and amide functions at C-9 and C-9' of the cyclolignan skeleton. All the compounds synthesized showed cytotoxicity levels in the microM range and below.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious evidence has shown that word frequencies calculated from corpora based on film and television subtitles can readily account for reading performance, since the language used in subtitles greatly approximates everyday language. The present study examines this issue in a society with increased exposure to subtitle reading. We compiled SUBTLEX-GR, a subtitled-based corpus consisting of more than 27 million Modern Greek words, and tested to what extent subtitle-based frequency estimates and those taken from a written corpus of Modern Greek account for the lexical decision performance of young Greek adults who are exposed to subtitle reading on a daily basis.
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