Flowering and Fruiting Haploid and Doubled Haploid Pummelos

Haploid and doubled haploid (DH) plants are of great value for genetic analyses and premeditated breeding. This is especially true for woody species, which are generally characterized by a long reproductive cycle, a high degree of heterozygosity, a large plant size, and self-incompatibility. In Citrus and related genera, some haploid and DH plants have been produced by techniques such as anther culture, interploid hybridization, and the pollination of irradiated pollen. However, there are few reports of the characteristics of haploid and DH plants’ flowers, fruits, or reproductive potential. We selected a haploid progeny among small seed-derived seedlings obtained from ‘Banpeiyu’ pummelo [C. maxima (Burm.) Merr.], and we produced the DH plant of this haploid using colchicine-treated axillary shoot buds. Both this haploid pummelo and the DH pummelo showed normal growth and produced many flowers and fruit. In this chapter, we describe about the morphological characteristics and the reproductive potential of the haploid pummelo and the DH pummelo

Diminished Medial Prefrontal Activity behind Autistic Social Judgments of Incongruent Information

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) tend to make inadequate social judgments, particularly when the nonverbal and verbal emotional expressions of other people are incongruent. Although previous behavioral studies have suggested that ASD individuals have difficulty in using nonverbal cues when presented with incongruent verbal-nonverbal information, the neural mechanisms underlying this symptom of ASD remain unclear. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we compared brain activity in 15 non-medicated adult males with high-functioning ASD to that of 17 age-, parental-background-, socioeconomic-, and intelligence-quotient-matched typically-developed (TD) male participants. Brain activity was measured while each participant made friend or foe judgments of realistic movies in which professional actors spoke with conflicting nonverbal facial expressions and voice prosody. We found that the ASD group made significantly less judgments primarily based on the nonverbal information than the TD group, and they exhibited significantly less brain activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex/ventral medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/vmPFC), and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) than the TD group. Among these five regions, the ACC/vmPFC and dmPFC were most involved in nonverbal-information-biased judgments in the TD group. Furthermore, the degree of decrease of the brain activity in these two brain regions predicted the severity of autistic communication deficits. The findings indicate that diminished activity in the ACC/vmPFC and dmPFC underlies the impaired abilities of individuals with ASD to use nonverbal content when making judgments regarding other people based on incongruent social information

Chromosome Doubling in Limonium bellidifolium (Gouan) Dumort. by Colchicine Treatment of Seeds

Limonium bellidifolium (2n = 2x = 18), a perennial statice belonging to the family Plumbaginaceae, is cultivated as a garden plant or for cut flowers and is an important breeding material for the production of hybrid cultivars in the genus. In this study, chromosome doubling in L. bellidifolium was attempted to increase the variability in horticultural traits. Seeds of this species were treated with an antimitotic agent, colchicine, at different concentrations and exposure periods. The treated seeds were sown in soil in a cell tray and the seedlings were grown in a greenhouse. More than 50% of the seedlings treated with colchicine for 24 or 48 h, irrespective of the concentration, survived for 4 months after treatment. Most of the seedlings treated for 72 h at any concentration showed very poor growth and abnormal thickening of the hypocotyl, and ultimately died. The surviving seedlings were grown in 9-cm pots. Flow cytometry analysis of leaf tissues showed that 2.5%–5% of plants that received 0.05% colchicine for 72 h, 0.25% colchicine for 24 h, 0.25% colchicine for 48 h, or 0.5% colchicine for 48 h were tetraploid (4x) or mixoploid (2x + 4x). The highest frequencies of tetraploids and mixoploids occurred following treatment with 0.05% colchicine for 72 h. These results showed that colchicine treatment of seeds is effective for chromosome doubling in L. bellidifolium. After 3 years of cultivation, the morphological characteristics of diploid and tetraploid L. bellidifolium plants at the flowering stage were investigated. The stomatal density was lower in all investigated tetraploid and mixoploid plants than in the control diploid plant. The stomatal length was 1.1- to 1.5-fold higher in all tetraploid and mixoploid plants than in the control. Tetraploid plants tended to have wider and thicker leaves than the control and also produced larger flowers