Publications by authors named "Thomas Christopher Rhys Williams"

Fatty acids (FAs) stored as triacylglycerols (TAGs) are an important source of carbon and energy for germination and seedling development, particularly for plants with small wind-dispersed seeds, allowing greater efficiency in storing both energy and carbon. These plants should be under strong selection to produce seeds rich in FAs and with large amounts of saturated FAs. Their closely packed single-chain configuration allows greater packing, more carbon and energy per unit mass, and are less costly to produce.

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Unlabelled: Climate change increases precipitation variability, particularly in savanna environments. We have used integrative strategies to understand the molecular mechanisms of drought tolerance, which will be crucial for developing improved genotypes. The current study compares the molecular and physiological parameters between the drought-tolerant Embrapa 48 and the sensitive BR16 genotypes.

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Every plant organ contains tens of different cell types, each with a specialized function. These functions are intrinsically associated with specific metabolic flux distributions that permit the synthesis of the ATP, reducing equivalents and biosynthetic precursors demanded by the cell. Investigating such cell-type-specific metabolism is complicated by the mosaic of different cells within each tissue combined with the relative scarcity of certain types.

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Corynebacterium glutamicum is a bacterium widely employed in the industrial production of amino acids as well as a broad range of other biotechnological products. The present study describes the characterization of C. glutamicum proteoforms, and their post-translational modifications (PTMs) employing top-down proteomics.

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Quinoa stands out as an excellent crop in the Cerrado region for cultivation in the off-season or irrigated winter season. Here, we tested the effects of different water regimes on the agronomic characteristics, physiology, and grain quality of different elite quinoa genotypes under field conditions. The experiment was conducted under field conditions at Embrapa Cerrados (Planaltina, DF, Brazil).

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Drought is one of the major constraints for soybean production in Brazil. In this study we investigated the physiological traits of two soybean parental genotypes under progressive soil drying and rewetting. The plants were evaluated under full irrigation (control) conditions and under water deficit imposed by suspending irrigation until the plants reached predawn leaf water potentials (Ψam) of -1.

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Until they become photoautotrophic juvenile plants, seedlings depend upon the reserves stored in seed tissues. These reserves must be mobilized and metabolized, and their breakdown products must be distributed to the different organs of the growing seedling. Here, we investigated the mobilization of soybean () seed reserves during seedling growth by initially constructing a genome-scale stoichiometric model for this important crop plant and then adapting the model to reflect metabolism in the cotyledons and hypocotyl/root axis (HRA).

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Plant dehydrins (DNHs) belong to the LEA (Late Embryogenesis Abundant) protein family and are involved in responses to multiple abiotic stresses. DHNs are classified into five subclasses according to the organization of three conserved motifs (K-; Y-; and S-segments). In the present study, the DHN protein family was characterized by molecular phylogeny, exon/intron organization, protein structure, and tissue-specificity expression in eight Fabaceae species.

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Wild peanut relatives (Arachis spp.) are genetically diverse and were selected throughout evolution to a range of environments constituting, therefore, an important source of allelic diversity for abiotic stress tolerance. In particular, A.

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Drought is the main abiotic stress constraining sugarcane production. However, our limited understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in the drought stress responses of sugarcane impairs the development of new technologies to increase sugarcane drought tolerance. Here, an integrated approach was performed to reveal the molecular and physiological changes in two closely related sugarcane cultivars, including the most extensively planted cultivar in Brazil (cv.

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Abundant evidence exists to support a role for lignin as an important element in biomass recalcitrance. However, several independent studies have also shown that factors apart from lignin are also relevant and overall, the relative importance of different recalcitrance traits remains in dispute. In this study we used two genetically distant sugarcane genotypes, and performed a correlational study with the variation in anatomical parameters, cell wall composition, and recalcitrance factors between these genotypes.

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