Plant roots : New challenges in a changing world

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Characterization of an allotriploid strawberry Fragaria × bifera Duchesne (Rosaceae) from Europe

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Biallelic and Genome Wide Association Mapping of Germanium Tolerant Loci in Rice (Oryza sativa L.)

Funding: This project was partially funded by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) grant (BB/J003336/1) awarded to AHP. The work was also supported by a self-funded studentship (PT). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Identification of rice blast disease-suppressing bacterial strains from the rhizosphere of rice grown in Pakistan.

Sixteen bacterial strains isolated from the roots and rhizosphere of rice plants growing in saline and non-saline soils from the Shorkot area of Pakistan were tested for their ability to promote plant growth and reduce the incidence of rice blast disease. When applied to the soil, many of the isolated rhizobacterial strains increased seedling growth and/or suppressed rice blast disease in greenhouse-grown plants of the cultivars Super Basmati and Azucena, but each cultivar responded to different subsets of the bacteria. In the cv Super Basmati, increased blast resistance was correlated with the production of siderophores by the rhizobacteria. Several strains inhibited the growth of the causative agent of rice blast disease, the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe grisea, in an in vitro dual culture assay. Direct bioantagonism was correlated with disease resistance in Super Basmati, but not in Azucena, and direct antagonism as a cause for the reduced disease incidence is also unlikely since no epiphytic colonisation of leaves was detected. Rhizosphere colonisation by the bacteria in plants grown in sterile sand was correlated with disease resistance in Super Basmati, but not in Azucena. As well as the differences in strains that protected each cv against blast disease, we also found that there were differences in the ability of some strains to protect plants against blast depending on soil type. Hence, there are complex interactions between rhizobacteria and rice plants with respect to biocontrol of rice blast disease, dependent upon both rice cv and soil type. The identity of strains that promoted high levels of disease protection, including three that performed well across all plant cultivars and growth conditions, was determined by 16S rRNA gene sequencing

Genome-Wide Association Mapping for Salt Tolerance of Rice Seedlings Grown in Hydroponic and Soil Systems Using the Bengal and Assam Aus Panel

Data Availability Statement The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation, to any qualified researcher. Funding The production of the BAAP was conducted under BBSRC funded project BB/J003336/1, with minor development under BB/N013492/1. CC gratefully acknowledges financial support from China Scholarship Council. Acknowledgments We thank Yang Guo, Wenchuang He, and Aadil Tantray for providing help measuring the phenotypic traits and editing the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Improved resolution in the position of drought-related QTLs in a single mapping population of rice by meta-analysis

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A novel method for accurate operon predictions in all sequenced prokaryotes

We combine comparative genomic measures and the distance separating adjacent genes to predict operons in 124 completely sequenced prokaryotic genomes. Our method automatically tailors itself to each genome using sequence information alone, and thus can be applied to any prokaryote. For Escherichia coli K12 and Bacillus subtilis, our method is 85 and 83% accurate, respectively, which is similar to the accuracy of methods that use the same features but are trained on experimentally characterized transcripts. In Halobacterium NRC-1 and in Helicobacter pylori, our method correctly infers that genes in operons are separated by shorter distances than they are in E.coli, and its predictions using distance alone are more accurate than distance-only predictions trained on a database of E.coli transcripts. We use microarray data from six phylogenetically diverse prokaryotes to show that combining intergenic distance with comparative genomic measures further improves accuracy and that our method is broadly effective. Finally, we survey operon structure across 124 genomes, and find several surprises: H.pylori has many operons, contrary to previous reports; Bacillus anthracis has an unusual number of pseudogenes within conserved operons; and Synechocystis PCC 6803 has many operons even though it has unusually wide spacings between conserved adjacent genes

Geochemical variability in the soils of Bangladesh as affected by sources of irrigation water and inundation land types

Funding Information: This work was done as part of a doctoral fellowship plan funded by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the UK. We gratefully acknowledge Bangladesh–Australia Centre for Environmental Research and Department of Soil, Water and Environment of the University of Dhaka for the support during the processing and preparation of the soil samples in Bangladesh. We also gratefully acknowledge the Computer and GIS Unit of Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) for providing GIS files for mapping of soils and land types. The soil samples were imported into the UK under import license IMP/SOIL/6/2013 issued by Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture. Funding Information: This study was funded by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the UK.Peer reviewedPublisher PD