Altered expression of a raspberry homologue of VRN1 is associated with disruption of dormancy induction and misregulation of subsets of dormancy-associated genes.

Winter dormancy is a key process in the phenology of temperate perennials. Climate change is severely impacting its course leading to economic losses in agriculture. A better understanding of the underlying mechanisms, as well as the genetic basis of the different responses, is necessary for the development of climate-resilient cultivars.

Drought has negative consequences on aphid fitness and plant vigor: Insights from a meta-analysis.

Aphids are abundant in natural and managed vegetation, supporting a diverse community of organisms and causing damage to agricultural crops. Due to a changing climate, periods of drought are anticipated to increase, and the potential consequences of this for aphid-plant interactions are unclear.Using a meta-analysis and synthesis approach, we aimed to advance understanding of how increased drought incidence will affect this ecologically and economically important insect group and to characterize any potential underlying mechanisms.

Learning-induced switching costs in a parasitoid can maintain diversity of host aphid phenotypes although biocontrol is destabilized under abiotic stress.

Aphid populations frequently include phenotypes that are resistant to parasitism by hymenopterous parasitoid wasps, which is often attributed to the presence of 'protective' facultative endosymbionts residing in aphid tissues, particularly Hamiltonella defensa. In field conditions, under parasitoid pressure, the observed coexistence of aphids with and without protective symbionts cannot be explained by their difference in fitness alone. Using the cereal aphid Rhopalosiphum padi as a model, we propose an alternative mechanism whereby parasitoids are more efficient at finding common phenotypes of aphid and experience a fitness cost when switching to the less common phenotype.

Enhancement of Glen Moy x Latham raspberry linkage map using GbS to further understand control of developmental processes leading to fruit ripening.

Background: The changing climate is altering timing of key fruit ripening processes and increasing the occurrence of fruit defects. To improve our understanding of the genetic control of raspberry fruit development an enhanced genetic linkage map was developed and used to examine ripening phenotypic data.

Results: In this study we developed an enhanced genetic linkage map for the raspberry cvs.

Modelling contact spread of infection in host-parasitoid systems: vertical transmission of pathogens can cause chaos.

All animals and plants are, to some extent, susceptible to disease caused by varying combinations of parasites, viruses and bacteria. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model of contact spread infection to investigate the effect of introducing a parasitoid-vectored infection into a one-host-two-parasitoid competition model. We use a system of ordinary differential equations to investigate the separate influences of horizontal and vertical pathogen transmission on a model system appropriate for a variety of competitive situations.

Disease induced dynamics in host-parasitoid systems: chaos and coexistence.

All animals and plants are, to some extent, susceptible to disease caused by varying combinations of parasites, viruses and bacteria. In this paper, we present a mathematical model of interactions between a host, two parasitoids and a pathogen which shows that the presence of an infection can preserve and promote diversity in such multi-species systems. Initially, we use a system of ordinary differential equations to investigate interactions between two species of parasitoids, a host and a host infection.