Understanding points at which ripening responses can be manipulated may reveal key, species- and cultivar-specific targets for regulation of ripening, enabling superior strategies for reducing postharvest wastage.Biotic stresses caused by microbial pathogens impair crop yield and quality if not restricted by expensive and often ecologically problematic pesticides. For a sustainable agriculture of tomorrow, breeding or engineering of pathogen-resistant crop varieties is therefore a major cornerstone. Maize is one of the four most important cereal crops in the world. The biotrophic fungal pathogen Ustilago maydis causes galls on all aerial parts of the maize plant. Biotrophic pathogens like U. maydis co-evolved with their host plant and depend during their life cycle on successful manipulation of the host's cellular machinery. Therefore, removing or altering plant susceptibility genes is an effective and usually durable way to obtain resistance in plants. Transcriptional time course experiments in U. maydis-infected maize revealed numerous maize genes being upregulated upon establishment of biotrophy. Among these genes is the maize LIPOXYGENASE 3 (LOX3) previously shown to be a susceptibility factor for other fungal genera as well. Aiming to engineer durable resistance in maize against U. maydis and possibly other pathogens, we took a Cas endonuclease technology approach to generate loss of function mutations in LOX3. lox3 maize mutant plants react with an enhanced PAMP-triggered ROS burst implicating an enhanced defense response. Based on visual assessment of disease symptoms and quantification of relative fungal biomass, homozygous lox3 mutant plants exposed to U. maydis show significantly decreased susceptibility. U. maydis infection assays using a transposon mutant lox3 maize line further substantiated that LOX3 is a susceptibility factor for this important maize pathogen.Mungbean (Vigna radiata L. Wilczek) is an annual grain legume crop affected by low availability of phosphorus. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/ars-853.html Phosphorus deficiency mainly affects the growth and development of plants along with changes in root morphology and increase in root-to-shoot ratio. Deciphering the genetic basis of phosphorus use efficiency (PUE) traits can benefit our understanding of mungbean tolerance to low-phosphorus condition. To address this issue, 144 diverse mungbean genotypes were evaluated for 12 PUE traits under hydroponics with optimum- and low-phosphorus levels. The broad sense heritability of traits ranged from 0.63 to 0.92 and 0.58 to 0.92 under optimum- and low-phosphorus conditions, respectively. This study, reports for the first time such a large number of genome wide Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (76,160) in mungbean. Further, genome wide association study was conducted using 55,634 SNPs obtained by genotyping-by-sequencing method. The results indicated that total 136 SNPs shared by both GLM and MLM modeow-phosphorus tolerance in mungbean.In recent years, the research and development of genome editing technology have been progressing rapidly, and the commercial use of genome-edited soybean started in the United States in 2019. A preceding study's results found that there is public concern with regard to the safety of high-tech foods, such as genetically modified foods and genome-edited foods. Twitter, one of the most popular social networks, allows users to post their opinions instantaneously, making it an extremely useful tool to collect what people are actually saying online in a timely manner. Therefore, it was used for collecting data on the users' concerns with and expectations of high-tech foods. This study collected and analyzed Twitter data on genome-edited foods and their labeling from May 25 to October 15 in 2019. Of 14,066 unique user IDs, 94.9% posted 5 or less tweets, whereas 64.8% tweeted only once, indicating that the majority of users who tweeted on this issue are not as intense, as they posted tweets consistently. After a procon by government officers and science communicators.Sexual reproduction is vital for population adaptation in clonal plants. The flag leaf is considered to be the primary contributor to sexual reproduction in cereal crops, and there is no unified conclusion on the effect of the number of vegetative ramets on grain yield. However, what effects of the flag leaf and the number of vegetative ramets on sexual reproductive performance of clonal grasses are largely unknown. To test this, under field natural conditions, we grew the rhizomatous grass Leymus chinensis in a homogeneous environment and conducted studies concerning the growth, reproduction and physiology of reproductive ramets in clonal populations. We measured the growth characteristics of different aged leaves, dynamically measured the net photosynthetic rate of different aged leaves and organ biomass, measured the sexual reproductive characteristics of reproductive ramets that had different numbers of connecting vegetative ramets, and performed isotope (15N) labeling of ramet pairs at the seed-filling slocated resources between the organs, but vegetative ramets are very advantageous for sexual reproduction under the tillering node connection form in L. chinensis. Overall, our study implies that vegetative ramets not only play an important role in the spatial expansion but also in the sexual reproduction of clonal plant populations.Global warming frequently leads to extreme temperatures, which pose a serious threat to the growth, development, and yield formation of crops such as maize. This study aimed to deeply explore the molecular mechanisms of young ear development under heat stress. We selected the heat-tolerant maize variety Zhengdan 958 (T) and heat-sensitive maize variety Xianyu 335 (S), and subjected them to heat stress in the V9 (9th leaf), V12 (12th leaf), and VT (tasseling) growth stages. We combined analysis of the maize phenotype with omics technology and physiological indicators to compare the differences in young ear morphology, total number of florets, floret fertilization rate, grain abortion rate, number of grains, and main metabolic pathways between plants subjected to heat stress and those left to develop normally. The results showed that after heat stress, the length and diameter of young ears, total number of florets, floret fertilization rate, and number of grains all decreased significantly, whereas the length of the undeveloped part at the top of the ear and grain abortion rate increased significantly.