Sex determination in bryophytes: current state of the art.

With the advent of genomic and other omics technologies, the last decades have witnessed a series of steady and important breakthroughs in the understanding of genetic determinants of different reproductive systems in vascular plants and especially on how sexual reproduction shaped their evolution. In contrast, the molecular mechanisms of these fundamental aspects of the biology of bryophytes, a group of non-vascular embryophyte plants sister to all tracheophytes, are still largely obscure. The recent characterization of the sex chromosomes and genetic switches determining sex in bryophytes and emerging approaches for molecular sexing of gametophytes hold great promise for elucidation of the evolutionary history as well as the conservation of this species-rich but understudied group of land plants.

Volatilomics of raspberry fruit germplasm by combining chromatographic and direct-injection mass spectrometric techniques.

The application of direct-injection mass spectrometric (DI-MS) techniques, like Proton Transfer Reaction Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry (PTR-ToF-MS) has been suggested as a reliable phenotyping tool for fruit volatilome assessment in both genetic and quality-related studies. In this study the complexity of raspberry aroma was investigated by a comprehensive untargeted VOC analysis, done by combining SPME-GC-MS and PTR-ToF-MS assessments with multi-block discriminant analysis using the DIABLO mixOmics framework. The aim was to acquire an exhaustive characterization of the raspberry volatilome according to different fruit ripening stages (pink, ripe, and overripe) and genetic variances (50 accessions), as well as to investigate the potential of PTR-ToF-MS as a rapid and high throughput VOC phenotyping tool to address issues related to raspberry fruit quality.