Tag: Genetics

Knowing that many small molecules act as growth regulators, chemical genomics endeavors to identify novel growth-regulating compounds through screening thousands of randomly generated molecules. Knowing that many peptides also act as growth regulators, Bao et al. used a similar approach to look for novel…

Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) stably regulates gene expression by initiating repressive histone methylation (specifically,  trimethylation of histone H3 at Lys27, H3K27me3). Xiao et al. investigated how PRC2 targets the genes it silences. They identified several Polycomb response elements (PREs)…

Mu et al. mapped a QTL previously shown to control fruit weight in tomato, and named the responsible gene Cell Size Regulator (CSR). They found that CSR-D, the derived allele, increases cell size and is widespread in Solanum lycopersicum var. lycopersicum, but not in ancestral tomatoes with smaller fruit.…

Cultivated apples (Malus domestica) trace their roots to Kazakhstan 4000 – 10,000 years ago, and since then have been propagated, transported, hybridized to other Malus species, and domesticated. Duan et al. sequenced more than 100 diverse accessions to trace apple's history and identify loci subjected…

Some plants can only flower after a cold period. This cold period has been shown to cause epigenetic gene silencing of an inhibitor of flowering, which in Arabidopsis is encoded by FLC. Yang and Berry et al. explore the mechanism by which FLC is epigenetically silenced in response to cold. Previous studies…

Gibberella stalk rot (GSR) is a fungal disease of maize.  Through QTL-seq, a whole genome sequencing method, Chen et al. identified a new resistance quantitative trait locus (QTL) Rgsr8.1 that confers broad-spectrum resistance to GSR. Two candidate genes were identified, one encoding an auxin response…

Improving photosynthetic efficiency is a major target for increasing crop biomass production and yield potential. The canopy photosynthetic efficiency, which is determined by leaf area index, canopy architecture, and leaf photosynthetic properties, plays an important role in determining biomass accumulation.…

The plastid genome of higher plants encodes about 100 genes, the products of which assemble with approximately 3,000 nucleus-encoded proteins to form the plastid transcription and translation machinery and carry out complex metabolic functions, including photosynthesis and fatty acid and amino acid biosynthesis.…