Project description:Brassica oleracea and Brassica napus are comprised of diverse cultivars that collectively constitute an important global food source. Of those, the Brassica oleracea convar. acephala cultivar group containing var. sabellica and var. palmifolia and Brassica napus var. pabularia, collectively known as kale, are nutritious leafy greens consumed for their abundance of vitamins and micronutrients. Typified by their curly, serrated or wavy leaves, kale varieties have been primarily defined based on their leaf morphology and geographic origin, despite maintaining complex genetic backgrounds. With changes in the diel molecular environment directly tied to multiple agronomic traits across the food production landscape (e.g. time-of-day nutritional content) and kale representing a candidate crop for vertical farming, we selected nine diverse kale varieties encompassing a wide swath of consumer kale varieties for growth under LED lights using precise real-world dawn/dusk growth conditions followed by quantitative GC-MS metabolomic and LC-MS proteomic analyses. With plant growth and development driven by the day-to-day molecular activities of plants, we harvested kale leaf tissue at end-of-day (ED) and end-of-night (EN) time-points for all metabolomic and proteomic analyses. Our results reveal that kale forms 2 distinct groups, defined by their diel metabolome and proteome signatures primarily involving amino acids and sugars along, with proteome changes in carbon and nitrogen metabolism, mRNA splicing, protein translation and light harvesting. Together, our analysis have derived robust quantitative insights into the diel growth and development landscape of kale, significantly advancing our fundamental understanding of this nutritious leafy green for next-generation breeding and biotechnology.
Project description:Morphotypes of Brassica oleracea are the result of a dynamic interaction between the genes that regulate the transition between vegetative and reproductive stages and those that regulate leaf morphology and plant architecture. In kales ornate leaf patterns, flowering delaying and nutrient quality are some of the characters were potentially selected by humans during domestication. Understanding candidate genes responsible for kale domestication is of importance to ultimately improve crop production. We aim to identify candidate genes that are responsible for kale leaf shape diversity and the evolution of domestic kale. Here we look at the global pattern of expressed genes during one single phase of development in kale, cabbage and TO1000 to gain an understanding of the genome-wide differences among some of the vegetative B. oleracea phenotypes. We identified gene expression patterns that are shared among the phenotypes and estimate the contribution of morphotype-specific gene expression patterns that set each of them apart. Differentially expressed developmental genes that regulate the vegetative to reproductive transition were abundant and present in all comparisons.
Project description:The first GSSM of V. vinifera was reconstructed (MODEL2408120001). Tissue-specific models for stem, leaf, and berry of the Cabernet Sauvignon cultivar were generated from the original model, through the integration of RNA-Seq data. These models have been merged into diel multi-tissue models to study the interactions between tissues at light and dark phases.
Project description:We performed ChIP-seq for the meiotic strand exchange protein DMC1, which marks an early stage in the meiotic recombination pathway, and the chromosome axis protein ASY1, which promotes interhomolog synapsis and recombination in plants, using tissue collected from immature pre-emergence spikes from wild type bread wheat cultivar Chinese Spring plants. To investigate connections between meiotic recombination and chromatin states in wheat, we also performed ChIP-seq for euchromatic (H3K4me3) and constitutive heterochromatic (H3K9me2 and H3K27me1) marks, and mapped genome-wide nucleosome occupancy via micrococcal nuclease sequencing (MNase-seq) using leaf tissue from Chinese Spring.