Root phenotypes for improved nitrogen capture.

Background: Suboptimal nitrogen availability is a primary constraint for crop production in low-input agroecosystems, while nitrogen fertilization is a primary contributor to the energy, economic, and environmental costs of crop production in high-input agroecosystems. In this article we consider avenues to develop crops with improved nitrogen capture and reduced requirement for nitrogen fertilizer.

Scope: Intraspecific variation for an array of root phenotypes has been associated with improved nitrogen capture in cereal crops, including architectural phenotypes that colocalize root foraging with nitrogen availability in the soil; anatomical phenotypes that reduce the metabolic costs of soil exploration, improve penetration of hard soil, and exploit the rhizosphere; subcellular phenotypes that reduce the nitrogen requirement of plant tissue; molecular phenotypes exhibiting optimized nitrate uptake kinetics; and rhizosphere phenotypes that optimize associations with the rhizosphere microbiome.

Phenotyping Alfalfa ( L.) Root Structure Architecture via Integrating Confident Machine Learning with ResNet-18.

Root system architecture (RSA) is of growing interest in implementing plant improvements with belowground root traits. Modern computing technology applied to images offers new pathways forward to plant trait improvements and selection through RSA analysis (using images to discern/classify root types and traits). However, a major stumbling block to image-based RSA phenotyping is image label noise, which reduces the accuracies of models that take images as direct inputs.

A mixture of grass-legume cover crop species may ameliorate water stress in a changing climate.

Climate change models predict increasing precipitation variability in the mid-latitude regions of Earth, generating a need to reduce the negative impacts of these changes on crop production. Despite considerable research on how cover crops support agriculture in a changing climate, understanding is limited of how climate change influences the growth of cover crops. We investigated the early development of two common cover crop species-crimson clover () and rye ()-and hypothesized that growing them in the mixture would ameliorate stress from drought or waterlogging.

A Tale of Two Tails: Rotational Spectroscopy of -Ethyl Maleimide and -Ethyl Succinimide.

Broadband microwave spectra of -ethyl maleimide (NEM) and -ethyl succinimide (NES) have been recorded using chirped pulse Fourier transform microwave spectroscopy in the -band (26.5-40 GHz). The spectra for both molecules were fit to a Watson A-reduced Hamiltonian in the I representation to obtain best fit experimental rotational constants (NEM: = 2143.