Halophytes and heavy metals: A multi-omics approach to understand the role of gene and genome duplication in the abiotic stress tolerance of Cakile maritima.

Premise: The origin of diversity is a fundamental biological question. Gene duplications are one mechanism that provides raw material for the emergence of novel traits, but evolutionary outcomes depend on which genes are retained and how they become functionalized. Yet, following different duplication types (polyploidy and tandem duplication), the events driving gene retention and functionalization remain poorly understood.

RootBot: High-throughput root stress phenotyping robot.

Premise: Higher temperatures across the globe are causing an increase in the frequency and severity of droughts. In agricultural crops, this results in reduced yields, financial losses, and increased food costs at the supermarket. Root growth maintenance in drying soils plays a major role in a plant's ability to survive and perform under drought, but phenotyping root growth is extremely difficult due to roots being under the soil.

Mangroves and multiplications: Influence of genome duplications on salt tolerance.

Whole-genome duplication (WGD) is an important force in plant diversification and novel environment adaptation. Various hypotheses have been proposed on the mechanism of how WGD influences this evolutionary process from chromosome recombination to genetic diversity (Qi et al., 2021).

Target sequence capture in orchids: Developing a kit to sequence hundreds of single-copy loci.

Premise: Understanding relationships among orchid species and populations is of critical importance for orchid conservation. Target sequence capture has become a standard method for extracting hundreds of orthologous loci for phylogenomics. Up-front cost and time associated with design of bait sets makes this method prohibitively expensive for many researchers.

The best of both worlds: Combining lineage-specific and universal bait sets in target-enrichment hybridization reactions.

Premise: Researchers adopting target-enrichment approaches often struggle with the decision of whether to use universal or lineage-specific probe sets. To circumvent this quandary, we investigate the efficacy of a simultaneous enrichment by combining universal probes and lineage-specific probes in a single hybridization reaction, to benefit from the qualities of both probe sets with little added cost or effort.

Methods And Results: Using 26 Brassicaceae libraries and standard enrichment protocols, we compare results from three independent data sets.

Comprehending Cornales: phylogenetic reconstruction of the order using the Angiosperms353 probe set.

Premise: Cornales is an order of flowering plants containing ecologically and horticulturally important families, including Cornaceae (dogwoods) and Hydrangeaceae (hydrangeas), among others. While many relationships in Cornales are strongly supported by previous studies, some uncertainty remains with regards to the placement of Hydrostachyaceae and to relationships among families in Cornales and within Cornaceae. Here we analyzed hundreds of nuclear loci to test published phylogenetic hypotheses and estimated a robust species tree for Cornales.