Radiation Hybrid Fine Mapping of Two Fertility-Related Genes: Marking the Path to Wheat Hybrids

Over one billion people, more than 1/9th of the global population, are undernourished. Feeding the ever increasing population has to be the most important goal of plant sciences. Since cultivated areas are not likely to increase, I will need to produce more with what is available. This can be summarized in one word: yield. Unfortunately, wheat’s yield is expected to increase only 1.13% by 2019, a prediction that if converted into reality will likely indicate that I failed to cope with the world demographic increase. A new strategy to revolutionize wheat production is required, and some believe that this change might be represented by wheat hybrids. Achieving adequate commercial production of wheat hybrids has the potential to nearly double the yield of one of the world’s most important staple food. The first fundamental step toward this goal is to develop feasible methodologies to sterilize the male part of the complete wheat flowers. Two fertility-related genes are the primary target of this study, namely the species cytoplasm specific on chromosome 1D, and the desynaptic locus on chromosome 3B. This dissertation summarizes the important achievements obtained toward the cloning of the two loci by means of radiation hybrid functional analysis. Radiation hybrid is a technique that employs radiation to create genetic diversity along the targeted chromosome. Chapter 1 explains in details how this methodology can be applied to plants. The use of radiation hybrid mapping permitted creating a comprehensive map of wheat chromosome 3B, as discussed in Chapter 2, and then expanded the mapping information to identify the 2 Mb location of the desynaptic locus desw2, as discussed in Chapter 3. A similar approach on chromosome 1D allowed first to pinpoint the location of the species cytoplasm specific gene to a region of 2 Mb, as discussed in Chapter 4, and then ultimately to find a strong candidate for this locus, as discussed in Chapter 5. Now that the molecular locations of these genes have been unraveled by this study, their sequence can be streamlined into transformation to ultimately produce female wheat plants, and consequently hybrids

Relativistic generalizations of gravity-induced localization models

Nonunitary versions of Newtonian gravity leading to wavefunction localization admit natural special-relativistic generalizations. They include the first consistent relativistic localization models. At variance with the unified model of localization and gravity, the purely localizing version requires negative energy fields, which however are less harmful than usual and can be used to build ultraviolet-finite theories.Comment: RevTex, 10 page

New strategy for germplasm partnership under ABI

Presentation given by Filippo Bassi during a partner meeting that took place in Istanbul, Turkiye, 13-15 December 2022 between ICARDA management and NARES leaders, selected based on their active role in requesting, using, and promoting ICARDA’s Genetic Innovations. ICARDA sought guidance from its NARES partners to determine if the portfolio of Genetic Innovation research defined in the 2017-2026 ICARDA Strategy is still significant to the 2030 horizon set by the CGIAR. As part of this initial engagement in CWANA++, this meeting provided the first step towards further inclusion of other involved CGIAR Centers. In their initial deliberations, NARES have expressed the following considerations to guide this prioritization work: food security, climate change, and strategies to support effective management of agriculture and food systems

Aide Memoire: high level guidance to 2030 for genetic innovation implementation in CWANA++

ICARDA-NARES consultation meeting, 13th-15th December 2022 Istanbul, Türkiye Aide Memoire: high level guidance to 2030 for genetic innovation implementation in CWANA+

What plant breeding may (and may not) look like in 2050?

At the turn of 2000 many authors envisioned future plant breeding. Twenty years after, which of those authors’ visions became reality or not, and which ones may become so in the years to come. After two decades of debates, climate change is a “certainty,” food systems shifted from maximizing farm production to reducing environmental impact, and hopes placed into GMOs are mitigated by their low appre ciation by consumers. We revise herein how plant breeding may raise or reduce genetic gains based on the breeder’s equation. “Accuracy of Selection” has signif icantly improved by many experimental-scale field and laboratory implements, but also by vulgarizing statistical models, and integrating DNA markers into selection. Pre-breeding has really promoted the increase of useful “Genetic Variance.” Short ening “Recycling Time” has seen great progression, to the point that achieving a denominator equal to “1” is becoming a possibility. Maintaining high “Selection Intensity” remains the biggest challenge, since adding any technology results in a higher cost per progeny, despite the steady reduction in cost per datapoint. Further more, the concepts of variety and seed enterprise might change with the advent of cheaper genomic tools to monitor their use and the promotion of participatory or cit izen science. The technological and societal changes influence the new generation of plant breeders, moving them further away from field work, emphasizing instead the use of genomic-based selection methods relying on big data. We envisage what skills plant breeders of tomorrow might need to address challenges, and whether their time in the field may dwindle

Simulating photonic devices with noisy optical elements

Quantum computers are inherently affected by noise. While in the long-term error correction codes will account for noise at the cost of increasing physical qubits, in the near-term the performance of any quantum algorithm should be tested and simulated in the presence of noise. As noise acts on the hardware, the classical simulation of a quantum algorithm should not be agnostic on the platform used for the computation. In this work, we apply the recently proposed noisy gates approach to efficiently simulate noisy optical circuits described in the dual rail framework. The evolution of the state vector is simulated directly, without requiring the mapping to the density matrix framework. Notably, we test the method on both the gate-based and measurement-based quantum computing models, showing that the approach is very versatile. We also evaluate the performance of a photonic variational quantum algorithm to solve the MAX-2-CUT problem. In particular we design and simulate an ansatz which is resilient to photon losses up to $p \sim 10^{-3}$ making it relevant for near term applications

Evaluation of Indian Durum Wheat Genotypes for Yield and Quality Traits Using Additive Main-Effects and Multiplicative Interaction (AMMI) Biplot Analysis under Terminal Heat Stress Conditions

The abrupt increase of temperatures during and after the flowering period of wheat is defined as terminal heat stress, and it causes severe reductions in productivity. One hundred two durum wheat lines were evaluated against this stress for three consecutive cropping seasons (2014–2017) in Indore, Madya Pradesh (India). The main objectives were to assess their grain yield potential, stability, and rheological quality characteristics under these conditions, and identify other contributing traits to adaptation. Combined ANOVA across environments showed significant differences (P < 0.01) for all factors, and high broad sense heritability was recorded for hectoliter weight, 1000-grains weight, grain yield, number of grains per spike, spike length, days to maturity, total carotene and sedimentation values. Grain yield showed significant (P < 0.01) positive associated with biomass, harvest index, hectoliter weight and significant negative associations with day to heading and maturity. Genotypes showed explicit variation to environmental condition as supported by significant (P < 0.01) for genotype × environment interaction (GEI). The traits like early heading, maturing, high biomass and hectoliter weight were the most critical traits for adaptation under terminal heat stress. To determine effects of GEI data were subjected to GGE biplot analysis, which identified as the most stable and performing across seasons G-30 (GW 1240) for hectoliter weight and G-98 (Vijay) for grain yield. These entries can now be combined via breeding to develop superior heat stress tolerant varieties