Project description:Take-all is a devastating soil-borne disease that affects wheat production. The continuous generation of disease-resistance germplasm is an important aspect of the management of this pathogen. In this study, we characterized the wheat-Psathyrostachys huashania Keng-derived progeny H139 that exhibits significantly improved resistance to wheat take-all disease compared with its susceptible parent 7182. GISH) and mc-FISH analyses revealed that H139 is a stable wheat-P. huashania disomic substitution line lacking wheat chromosome 2D.EST-STS marker and Wheat Axiom 660K Genotyping Array analysis further revealed that H139 was a novel wheat-P. huashania 2Ns/2D substitution line, and that the P. huashania 2Ns chromosome shares high sequence similarity to wheat chromosome 2D. These results indicate that H139, with its enhanced wheat take-all disease resistance and desirable agronomic traits, provides valuable genetic resources for wheat chromosome engineering breeding.
Project description:In order to select halophilic microorganisms as a source of compounds with cytotoxic activities, a total of 135 bacterial strains were isolated from water and sediment samples collected from the Zipaquirá salt mine in the Colombian Andes. We determined the cytotoxic effects of 100 crude extracts from 54 selected organisms on the adherent murine mammary cell carcinoma 4T1 and human mammary adenocarcinoma MCF-7 cell lines. These extracts were obtained from strains of Isoptericola, Ornithinimicrobium, Janibacter, Nesterenkonia, Alkalibacterium, Bacillus, Halomonas, Chromohalobacter, Shewanella, Salipiger, Martellela, Oceanibaculum, Caenispirillum and Labrenzia. The extracts of 23 strains showed an IC50 of less than 100 μg mL-1. They were subsequently analyzed by LC/MS allowing dereplication of 20 compounds. The cytotoxic effect was related to a complex mixture of diketopiperazines present in many of the extracts analyzed. The greatest cytotoxic activity against both of the evaluated cell lines was obtained from the chloroform extract of Labrenzia aggregata USBA 371 which had an IC50 < 6 μg mL-1. Other extracts with high levels of cytotoxic activity were obtained from Bacillus sp. (IC50 < 50 μg mL-1) which contained several compounds such as macrolactin L and A, 7-O-succinoylmacrolactin F and iturin. Shewanella chilikensis USBA 344 also showed high levels of cytotoxic activity against both cell lines in the crude extract: an IC50 < 15 μg mL-1 against the 4T1 cell line and an IC50 < 68 μg mL-1 against the MCF-7 cell line. Nesterenkonia sandarakina CG 35, which has an IC50 of 118 µg mL-1 against 4T1, is a producer of diketopiperazines and 1-acetyl-β-carboline. Also, Ornithinimicrobium kibberense CG 24, which has IC50 < 50 μg mL-1, was a producer of diketopiperazines and lagunamycin. Our study demonstrates that these saline environments are habitats of halophilic and halotolerant bacteria that have previously unreported cytotoxic activity.
Project description:Root traits are significant targets for breeding stress-resilient and high-yielding wheat genotypes under climatic fluctuations. However, root transcriptome analysis is usually obscured due to challenges in root research. We performed transcriptome analysis of thirty bread wheat cultivars using RNA-seq to investigate the diversity and expression of root system architecture (RSA) related transcripts. We examined the expression patterns of these transcripts in both root and leaf tissues and found that various transcripts are root-specific which could be manipulated for desirable root traits.The presented RNA-seq datasets provide valueable source for identification of genes involved in various biological processes under varying climatic conditions.
Project description:Over 200 years ago Alexander von Humboldt (1808) observed that plant and animal diversity peaks at tropical latitudes and decreases toward the poles, a trend he attributed to more favorable temperatures in the tropics. Studies to date suggest that this temperature-diversity gradient is weak or nonexistent for Bacteria and Archaea. To test the impacts of temperature as well as pH on bacterial and archaeal diversity, we performed pyrotag sequencing of 16S rRNA genes retrieved from 165 soil, sediment and biomat samples of 36 geothermal areas in Canada and New Zealand, covering a temperature range of 7.5-99 °C and a pH range of 1.8-9.0. This represents the widest ranges of temperature and pH yet examined in a single microbial diversity study. Species richness and diversity indices were strongly correlated to temperature, with R(2) values up to 0.62 for neutral-alkaline springs. The distributions were unimodal, with peak diversity at 24 °C and decreasing diversity at higher and lower temperature extremes. There was also a significant pH effect on diversity; however, in contrast to previous studies of soil microbial diversity, pH explained less of the variability (13-20%) than temperature in the geothermal samples. No correlation was observed between diversity values and latitude from the equator, and we therefore infer a direct temperature effect in our data set. These results demonstrate that temperature exerts a strong control on microbial diversity when considered over most of the temperature range within which life is possible.
Project description:BackgroundMicrobial inhabitants of soils are important to ecosystem and planetary functions, yet there are large gaps in our knowledge of their diversity and ecology. The 'Biomes of Australian Soil Environments' (BASE) project has generated a database of microbial diversity with associated metadata across extensive environmental gradients at continental scale. As the characterisation of microbes rapidly expands, the BASE database provides an evolving platform for interrogating and integrating microbial diversity and function.FindingsBASE currently provides amplicon sequences and associated contextual data for over 900 sites encompassing all Australian states and territories, a wide variety of bioregions, vegetation and land-use types. Amplicons target bacteria, archaea and general and fungal-specific eukaryotes. The growing database will soon include metagenomics data. Data are provided in both raw sequence (FASTQ) and analysed OTU table formats and are accessed via the project's data portal, which provides a user-friendly search tool to quickly identify samples of interest. Processed data can be visually interrogated and intersected with other Australian diversity and environmental data using tools developed by the 'Atlas of Living Australia'.ConclusionsDeveloped within an open data framework, the BASE project is the first Australian soil microbial diversity database. The database will grow and link to other global efforts to explore microbial, plant, animal, and marine biodiversity. Its design and open access nature ensures that BASE will evolve as a valuable tool for documenting an often overlooked component of biodiversity and the many microbe-driven processes that are essential to sustain soil function and ecosystem services.
Project description:Millet is a dangerous weed in Hungary. Lack of seed dormancy helps it to spread easily and be present at maize, wheat and other crop fields. Our previous report revealed the possibility that millet can also play a role as a virus reservoir. In that study we detected the presence of several viruses in millet using DAS ELISA. Because serological methods can only detect the presence of the investigated particular pathogens, we suspected that other, previously unknown viruses can also be present in this weed. To investigate this theory, we randomly sampled two locations and collected millets showing stunting, chlorosis, and striped leaves and investigated the presence of viruses using small RNA HTS as a diagnostic method. Our result confirmed the widespread presence of wheat streak mosaic virus at both locations. Moreover, barley yellow striate mosaic virus and barley virus G were also identified, which have not been described from Hungary before. As these viruses can cause severe diseases on wheat, their presence on a weed mean a potential infection risk. Our study indicates that the presence of millets on the fields needs a special control in order to prevent emergence of new diseases at crop fields.
Project description:Responding to change is a fundamental property of life, making time-series data invaluable in biology. For microbes, plate readers are a popular, convenient means to measure growth and also gene expression using fluorescent reporters. Nevertheless, the difficulties of analysing the resulting data can be a bottleneck, particularly when combining measurements from different wells and plates. Here we present omniplate, a Python module that corrects and normalises plate-reader data, estimates growth rates and fluorescence per cell as functions of time, calculates errors, exports in different formats, and enables meta-analysis of multiple plates. The software corrects for autofluorescence, the optical density's non-linear dependence on the number of cells, and the effects of the media. We use omniplate to measure the Monod relationship for the growth of budding yeast in raffinose, showing that raffinose is a convenient carbon source for controlling growth rates. Using fluorescent tagging, we study yeast's glucose transport. Our results are consistent with the regulation of the hexose transporter (HXT) genes being approximately bipartite: the medium and high affinity transporters are predominately regulated by both the high affinity glucose sensor Snf3 and the kinase complex SNF1 via the repressors Mth1, Mig1, and Mig2; the low affinity transporters are predominately regulated by the low affinity sensor Rgt2 via the co-repressor Std1. We thus demonstrate that omniplate is a powerful tool for exploiting the advantages offered by time-series data in revealing biological regulation.
Project description:BackgroundAcquisition of the intestinal microbiota in early life corresponds with the development of the mucosal immune system. Recent work on caesarean-delivered infants revealed that early microbial composition is influenced by birthing method and environment. Furthermore, we have confirmed that early-life environment strongly influences both the adult gut microbiota and development of the gut immune system. Here, we address the impact of limiting microbial exposure after initial colonization on the development of adult gut immunity.Methodology/principal findingsPiglets were born in indoor or outdoor rearing units, allowing natural colonization in the immediate period after birth, prior to transfer to high-health status isolators. Strikingly, gut closure and morphological development were strongly affected by isolator-rearing, independent of indoor or outdoor origins of piglets. Isolator-reared animals showed extensive vacuolation and disorganization of the gut epithelium, inferring that normal gut closure requires maturation factors present in maternal milk. Although morphological maturation and gut closure were delayed in isolator-reared animals, these hard-wired events occurred later in development. Type I IFN, IL-22, IL-23 and Th17 pathways were increased in indoor-isolator compared to outdoor-isolator animals during early life, indicating greater immune activation in pigs originating from indoor environments reflecting differences in the early microbiota. This difference was less apparent later in development due to enhanced immune activation and convergence of the microbiota in all isolator-reared animals. This correlated with elevation of Type I IFN pathways in both groups, although T cell pathways were still more affected in indoor-reared animals.Conclusions/significanceEnvironmental factors, in particular microbial exposure, influence expression of a large number of immune-related genes. However, the homeostatic effects of microbial colonization in outdoor environments require sustained microbial exposure throughout development. Gut development in high-hygiene environments negatively impacts on normal succession of the gut microbiota and promotes innate immune activation which may impair immune homeostasis.