Strengthening the impact of plant genetic resources through collaborative collection, conservation, characterisation, and evaluation: a tribute to the legacy of Dr Clive Francis

This paper is a tribute to the legacy of Dr Clive Francis, who directly and indirectly collected >14 000 accessions across 60 genera of pasture, forage, and crop species and their wild relatives around the Mediterranean basin, Eastern Africa, and Central and South Asia from 1973 to 2005. This was achieved by a collaborative approach that built strong interactions between disparate organisations (ICARDA, VIR, CLIMA, and Australian genebanks) based on germplasm exchange, conservation and documentation, capacity building, and joint collection. These activities greatly strengthened Australian pasture, forage, and crop genebanks, and led to widespread germplasm utilisation that has waned in the last 5 years, reflecting changing priorities among industry funding bodies and research providers. This situation must be reversed, given the pivotal role genetic resource collections must play to broaden the genetic and adaptive base of plant breeding, to meet the challenge of feeding an increasing population in a depleting resource base. Because the use of germplasm subsets that facilitate phenotyping will stimulate wider utilisation of genetic resources, we discuss the application of core collection and germplasm selection through habitat characterisation/filtering in Australian collections. Both are valid entry points into large collections, but the latter has the advantage of enabling both trait discovery and investigation of plant adaptation, and because it is based on a priori hypothesis testing, it increases understanding even when the trait of interest is not identified

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Association of baseline hematoma and edema volumes with one-year outcome and long-term survival after spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage: A community-based inception cohort study

Background Hospital-based studies have reported variable associations between outcome after spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage and peri-hematomal edema volume. Aims In a community-based study, we aimed to investigate the existence, strength, direction, and independence of associations between intracerebral hemorrhage and peri-hematomal edema volumes on diagnostic brain CT and one-year functional outcome and long-term survival. Methods We identified all adults, resident in Lothian, diagnosed with first-ever, symptomatic spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage between June 2010 and May 2013 in a community-based, prospective inception cohort study. We defined regions of interest manually and used a semi-automated approach to measure intracerebral hemorrhage volume, peri-hematomal edema volume, and the sum of these measurements (total lesion volume) on first diagnostic brain CT performed at ≤3 days after symptom onset. The primary outcome was death or dependence (scores 3–6 on the modified Rankin Scale) at one-year after intracerebral hemorrhage. Results Two hundred ninety-two (85%) of 342 patients (median age 77.5 y, IQR 68–83, 186 (54%) female, median time from onset to CT 6.5 h (IQR 2.9–21.7)) were dead or dependent one year after intracerebral hemorrhage. Peri-hematomal edema and intracerebral hemorrhage volumes were colinear ( R2 = 0.77). In models using both intracerebral hemorrhage and peri-hematomal edema, 10 mL increments in intracerebral hemorrhage (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 1.72 (95% CI 1.08–2.87); p = 0.029) but not peri-hematomal edema volume (aOR 0.92 (0.63–1.45); p = 0.69) were independently associated with one-year death or dependence. 10 mL increments in total lesion volume were independently associated with one-year death or dependence (aOR 1.24 (1.11–1.42); p = 0.0004). Conclusion Total volume of intracerebral hemorrhage and peri-hematomal edema, and intracerebral hemorrhage volume alone on diagnostic brain CT, undertaken at three days or sooner, are independently associated with death or dependence one-year after intracerebral hemorrhage, but peri-hematomal edema volume is not. Data access statement Anonymized summary data may be requested from the corresponding author. </jats:sec