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<jats:p>The hull-less pumpkin (<jats:italic>Cucurbita pepo</jats:italic>) seed does not require de-hulling before use for human consumption, as a result highly preferred by the oil, nut, and baking industries. In hull-less seeds, a single recessive gene is responsible for the absence of outer thick seed coat layers; however, the genomic region and gene(s) controlling the trait are unclear to date. In this study, four crosses attempted to derive F<jats:sub>2</jats:sub> and backcross populations confirmed the single recessive gene inheritance of hull-less seed trait in populations adapted to the sub-tropical climate. The candidate genomic region for hull-less seed trait was identified through the BSA-QTLseq approach using bulks of F<jats:sub>2:3</jats:sub> progenies from a cross of HP111 (hulled) and HLP36 (hull-less). A novel genomic region on chromosome 12 ranging from 1.80 to 3.86 Mb was associated with the hull-less seed trait. The re-sequencing data identified a total of 396 SNPs within this region and eight were successfully converted into polymorphic KASP assays. The genotyping of segregating F<jats:sub>2</jats:sub> (<jats:italic>n</jats:italic> = 160) with polymorphic KASP assays resulted in a 40.3 cM partial linkage map and identified Cp_3430407 (10 cM) and Cp_3498687 (16.1 cM) as flanking markers for hull-less locus (<jats:italic>Cphl-1</jats:italic>). These flanking markers correspond to the 68.28 kb region in the reference genome, and the marker, Cp_3430407 successfully predicted the genotype in 93.33% of the <jats:italic>C. pepo</jats:italic> hull-less germplasm lines, thus can be used for marker-assisted selection in parents polymorphic for the hull-less seed trait. The <jats:italic>Cphl-1</jats:italic>-linked genomic region (2.06 Mb) encompasses a total of 182 genes, including secondary cell wall and lignin biosynthesis-related transcriptional factors <jats:italic>viz</jats:italic>., “NAC” (<jats:italic>Cp4.1LG12g04350</jats:italic>) and “MYB” (<jats:italic>Cp4.1LG12g03120</jats:italic>). These genes were differentially expressed in the seeds of hulled and hull-less genotypes, and therefore could be the potential candidate genes governing the hull-less seed trait in pumpkin.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Ecological rivers or ecological channels are being widely used. Precious measurement and estimation of flow in irrigation areas are important issues in agricultural engineering. For the sustainable development of vegetation, it is necessary to consider how to use sensors to measure flow more easily in the river to protect both plants and sensors from damage. This article selects smooth channels and ecological channels of different shapes for research and presents a simplified method for arming ultrasonic sensors to obtain channel flow velocity. The flow characteristics along the normal line direction are obtained by theoretical analysis. The method uses the average flow velocity based on the normal to the channel wall to determine the location of the sensors. It combines the flow velocity determined by the sensors with the flow calculation method, thus simplifying the flow estimation steps. Experiments under flow conditions validate the efficacy of the proposed ultrasonic sensor arrangement method. This article not only simplifies the arrangement of sensors in channel flow but also improves the accuracy of the flow measurement method, which is important to promote the construction of ecological channels.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Germacrene A (GA) is a key intermediate for the synthesis of medicinal active compounds, especially for β-elemene, which is a broad-spectrum anticancer drug. The production of sufficient GA in the microbial platform is vital for the precursors supply of active compounds. In this study, <jats:italic>Escherichia coli</jats:italic> BL21 Star (DE3) was used as the host and cultivated in SBMSN medium, obtaining a highest yield of FPP. The GA synthase from <jats:italic>Lactuca sativa</jats:italic> (LTC2) exhibited the highest level of GA production. Secondly, two residues involved in product release (T410 and T392) were substituted with Ser and Ala, respectively, responsible for relatively higher activities. Next, substitution of selected residues S243 with Asn caused an increase in activity. Furthermore, I364K-T410S and T392A-T410S were created by combination with the beneficial mutation, and they demonstrated dramatically enhanced titers with 1.90-fold and per-cell productivity with 5.44-fold, respectively. Finally, the production titer of GA reached 126.4 mg/L, and the highest productivity was 7.02 mg/L.h by the I364K-T410S mutant in a shake-flask batch culture after fermentation for 18 h. To our knowledge, the productivity of the I364K-T410S mutant is the highest level ever reported. These results highlight a promising method for the industrial production of GA in <jats:italic>E. coli</jats:italic>, and lay a foundation for pathway reconstruction and the production of valuable natural sesquiterpenes.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The ecologically and economically important genus <jats:italic>Chrysanthemum</jats:italic> contains around 40 species and many hybrids and cultivars. The dried capitulum of <jats:italic>Chrysanthemum morifolium</jats:italic> (CM) Ramat. Tzvel, i.e., <jats:italic>Flos Chrysanthemi</jats:italic>, is frequently used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and folk medicine for at least 2,200 years. It has also been a popular tea beverage for about 2,000 years since Han Dynasty in China. However, the origin of different cultivars of CM and the phylogenetic relationship between <jats:italic>Chrysanthemum</jats:italic> and related Asteraceae genera are still elusive, and there is a lack of comprehensive review about the association between biodiversity and chemodiversity of <jats:italic>Chrysanthemum</jats:italic>. This article aims to provide a synthetic summary of the phylogeny, biodiversity, phytometabolites and chemodiversity of <jats:italic>Chrysanthemum</jats:italic> and related taxonomic groups, focusing on CM and its wild relatives. Based on extensive literature review and in light of the medicinal value of chrysanthemum, we give some suggestions for its relationship with some genera/species and future applications. Mining chemodiversity from biodiversity of <jats:italic>Chrysanthemum</jats:italic> containing subtribe Artemisiinae, as well as mining therapeutic efficacy and other utilities from chemodiversity/biodiversity, is closely related with sustainable conservation and utilization of Artemisiinae resources. There were eight main cultivars of <jats:italic>Flos Chrysanthemi</jats:italic>, i.e., Hangju, Boju, Gongju, Chuju, Huaiju, Jiju, Chuanju and Qiju, which differ in geographical origins and processing methods. Different CM cultivars originated from various hybridizations between multiple wild species. They mainly contained volatile oils, triterpenes, flavonoids, phenolic acids, polysaccharides, amino acids and other phytometabolites, which have the activities of antimicrobial, anti-viral, antioxidant, anti-aging, anticancer, anti-inflammatory, and closely related taxonomic groups could also be useful as food, medicine and tea. Despite some progresses, the genetic/chemical relationships among varieties, species and relevant genera have yet to be clarified; therefore, the roles of pharmacophylogeny and omics technology are highlighted.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Cadmium (Cd) pollution not only reduces crop yields, but also threatens human health and food safety. It is of great significance for agricultural production to improve plant Cd resistance and reduce Cd accumulation. In Arabidopsis, tryptophan (Trp) has been found to play a role in Cd resistance. However, studies on the role of exogenous Trp on Cd tolerance in crops are limited. Here, we report that exogenous Trp application can effectively alleviate biomass decline induced by Cd stress and inhibit Cd transport from roots to shoots in <jats:italic>Brassica oleracea</jats:italic> var. <jats:italic>italica</jats:italic> (broccoli). Compared to Cd stress alone, the fresh weight of shoots and roots of <jats:italic>B. oleracea</jats:italic> seedlings treated with Cd and Trp increased by 25 and 120%, respectively, and the Cd content in shoots decreased by 51.6%. In combination with physiological indices and transcriptome analysis, we preliminarily explored the mechanism of Trp alleviating Cd stress and affecting Cd transport. Trp inhibited Cd-induced indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) conjugation, thereby providing enough free IAA to sustain growth under Cd stress; Trp inhibited the indolic glucosinolate (IGS) biosynthesis induced by Cd. Considering that the synthesis of IGS consumes glutathione (GSH) as a sulfur donor, the inhibition of Trp in IGS synthesis may be conducive to maintaining a high GSH content to be against Cd stress. Consistent with this, we found that GSH content under Cd stress with Trp application was higher than that of Cd alone. In addition to alleviating the damage caused by Cd, Trp can also inhibit the upward transport of Cd from roots to shoots, possibly by repressing the expression of <jats:italic>HMA4</jats:italic>, which encodes a transporter responsible for the xylem loading and Cd upward transport.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Accurate and timely surveys of rice diseases and pests are important to control them and prevent the reduction of rice yields. The current manual survey method of rice diseases and pests is time-consuming, laborious, highly subjective and difficult to trace historical data. To address these issues, we developed an intelligent monitoring system for detecting and identifying the disease and pest lesions on the rice canopy. The system mainly includes a network camera, an intelligent detection model of diseases and pests on rice canopy, a web client and a server. Each camera of the system can collect rice images in about 310 m<jats:sup>2</jats:sup> of paddy fields. An improved model YOLO-Diseases and Pests Detection (YOLO-DPD) was proposed to detect three lesions of <jats:italic>Cnaphalocrocis medinalis, Chilo suppressalis,</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>Ustilaginoidea virens</jats:italic> on rice canopy. The residual feature augmentation method was used to narrow the semantic gap between different scale features of rice disease and pest images. The convolution block attention module was added into the backbone network to enhance the regional disease and pest features for suppressing the background noises. Our experiments demonstrated that the improved model YOLO-DPD could detect three species of disease and pest lesions on rice canopy at different image scales with an average precision of 92.24, 87.35 and 90.74%, respectively, and a mean average precision of 90.11%. Compared to RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN and Yolov4 models, the mean average precision of YOLO-DPD increased by 18.20, 6.98, 6.10%, respectively. The average detection time of each image is 47 ms. Our system has the advantages of unattended operation, high detection precision, objective results, and data traceability.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Most regions of the Antarctic continent are experiencing increased dryness due to global climate change. Mosses and lichens are the dominant vegetation of the ice-free areas of Antarctica. However, the molecular mechanisms of these Antarctic plants adapting to drought stress are less documented. Here, transcriptome and metabolome analyses were employed to reveal the responses of an Antarctic moss (<jats:italic>Pohlia nutans</jats:italic> subsp. LIU) to drought stress. We found that drought stress made the gametophytes turn yellow and curled, and enhanced the contents of malondialdehyde and proline, and the activities of antioxidant enzymes. Totally, 2,451 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were uncovered under drought treatment. The representative DEGs are mainly involved in ROS-scavenging and detoxification, flavonoid metabolism pathway, plant hormone signaling pathway, lipids metabolism pathway, transcription factors and signal-related genes. Meanwhile, a total of 354 differentially changed metabolites (DCMs) were detected in the metabolome analysis. Flavonoids and lipids were the most abundant metabolites and they accounted for 41.53% of the significantly changed metabolites. In addition, integrated transcriptome and metabolome analyses revealed co-expression patterns of flavonoid and long-chain fatty acid biosynthesis genes and their metabolites. Finally, qPCR analysis demonstrated that the expression levels of stress-related genes were significantly increased. These genes included those involved in ABA signaling pathway (<jats:italic>NCED3</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>PP2C</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>PYL</jats:italic>, and <jats:italic>SnAK2</jats:italic>), jasmonate signaling pathway (<jats:italic>AOC</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>AOS</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>JAZ</jats:italic>, and <jats:italic>OPR</jats:italic>), flavonoid pathway (<jats:italic>CHS</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>F3’,5’H</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>F3H</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>FLS</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>FNS</jats:italic>, and <jats:italic>UFGT</jats:italic>), antioxidant and detoxifying functions (<jats:italic>POD</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>GSH-Px</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>Prx</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>DTX</jats:italic>), and transcription factors (<jats:italic>ERF</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>DREB</jats:italic>). In summary, we speculated that <jats:italic>P. nutans</jats:italic> were highly dependent on ABA and jasmonate signaling pathways, ROS scavenging, flavonoids and fatty acid metabolism in response to drought stress. These findings present an important knowledge for assessing the impact of coastal climate change on Antarctic basal plants.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In plants, cytosolic and extracellular pH homeostasis are crucial for various physiological processes, including the uptake of macronutrients and micronutrients, cell elongation, cell expansion, and enzyme activity. Proton (H<jats:sup>+</jats:sup>) gradients and the membrane potential are generated by a H<jats:sup>+</jats:sup> pump consisting of an active primary transporter. Plasma membrane (PM) H<jats:sup>+</jats:sup>-ATPase, a PM-localized H<jats:sup>+</jats:sup> pump, plays a pivotal role in maintaining pH homeostasis in plant cells and extracellular regions. PM H<jats:sup>+</jats:sup>-ATPase activity is regulated by protein abundance and by post-translational modifications. Several stimuli have been found to activate the PM H<jats:sup>+</jats:sup>-ATPase through phosphorylation of the penultimate threonine (Thr) of the carboxy terminus. Light- and photosynthesis-induced phosphorylation of PM H<jats:sup>+</jats:sup>-ATPase are conserved phenomena among various plant species. In this work, we review recent findings related to PM H<jats:sup>+</jats:sup>-ATPase regulation in the photosynthetic tissues of plants, focusing on its mechanisms and physiological roles. The physiological roles of photosynthesis-dependent PM H<jats:sup>+</jats:sup>-ATPase activation are discussed in the context of nitrate uptake and cytoplasmic streaming in leaves.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The G-box regulating factors (GRFs) are involved in a wide array of signal transduction pathway and play important roles in plant physiological and developmental processes and stress responses. The GRF proteins have previously been described in several plant species, but not in rapeseed (<jats:italic>Brassica napus</jats:italic> L.). In this study, we carried out genome-wide analysis of <jats:italic>GRFs</jats:italic> in <jats:italic>B</jats:italic>. <jats:italic>napus</jats:italic> based on the available genome sequence information, and analyzed their expression in different tissues under different hormone treatments and after inoculation with <jats:italic>Sclerotinia sclerotiorum</jats:italic>. We identified 46 putative <jats:italic>BnaGRF</jats:italic> genes in rapeseed, unevenly distributed on 18 chromosomes. Like the 14-3-3 proteins in other plant species, the 46 putative BnaGRFs could be classified into two major evolutionary branches: epsilon (ε) group and non-epsilon (non-ε) group. Evolutionary analysis indicated that the <jats:italic>BnaGRF</jats:italic> gene family expanded in both groups much before speciation. We discovered an expansion of the <jats:italic>14-3-3</jats:italic> gene family that likely occurred during a recent gene duplication event. Collinearity analysis revealed that most of the <jats:italic>BnaGRF</jats:italic> genes shared syntenic relationships. Global gene expression profiling of <jats:italic>BnaGRFs</jats:italic> by RNA-seq analysis showed 41.3% (19/46) response to <jats:italic>S</jats:italic>. <jats:italic>sclerotiorum</jats:italic> infection, and this response was probably mediated through jasmonic acid (JA) and salicylic acid (SA) signaling pathways. These results provide key insights into the role of 14-3-3s in the biotic stress response and enhance our understanding of their multiple functions in <jats:italic>B</jats:italic>. <jats:italic>napus</jats:italic>.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In some cases, polyploidy is an important phenomenon in the evolution of fruit crops. Polyploidy can be used in fruit breeding programs to develop varieties with higher yields and better fruit quality, as well as better adaptation to adverse environmental conditions. In this study, three wild species of blackberry were subjected to different degrees of induced polyploidy, and the effects of which were evaluated on morphological, physiological, and phytohormonal traits. With the aim of gaining a deep insight into the generative phase of plant growth and development, different levels of induced polyploidy were evaluated on the three blackberry species, i.e., <jats:italic>Rubus persicus</jats:italic> Bioss. (<jats:italic>2x, 4x</jats:italic>, and <jats:italic>8x</jats:italic>), <jats:italic>R. caesius</jats:italic> L. (<jats:italic>2x</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>4x</jats:italic>), and <jats:italic>R. hirtus</jats:italic> Schreb. <jats:italic>(2x</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>4x</jats:italic>). The results showed that the polyploid plants performed significantly better than their diploid counterparts in terms of morphological traits such as flower count per spike and berry weight, as well as biochemical traits such as total soluble solids in the leaves. Induced polyploidy increased berry weight and drupe count per fruit. Microscopic examinations revealed a smaller number of viable pollen in the polyploids, compared to the diploids. Electron microscopy showed that the octaploid <jats:italic>R. persicus</jats:italic> had larger conical cells on the flower surface, compared to the diploid <jats:italic>R. persicus</jats:italic>. Correlation analysis showed that the ratio of indoleacetic acid to jasmonic acid changed synergistically with the total soluble solids in the leaves during the fruit set. The ploidy level correlated significantly with the number of pistils, leaf green index, total soluble solids in the leaves, and glucose content in floral nectar. Overall, induced polyploidy allowed <jats:italic>Rubus</jats:italic> to develop advantageous traits that can benefit future breeding programs and expand reproductive research in blackberries.</jats:p>