Project description:Elevated temperatures resulting from climate change are adversely impacting natural and crop ecosystems, necessitating the development of heat-tolerant crops. We established a framework to precisely identify wheat protein-phosphorylated sites associated with varying temperature sensitivities. Our findings demonstrate that the phosphorylation state of a specific set of proteins creates a unique signature for heat stress tolerance. These findings aid the identification of targets for breeding or genome editing to enhance heat tolerance.
Project description:Advancements in -omics techniques provide powerful tools to assess potential effects in composition of a plant at the RNA, protein and metabolite levels. These technologies can thus be deployed to assess whether genetic engineering causes changes in plants that go beyond the changes introduced by conventionally plant breeding. Here, we compare the extent of transcriptome and metabolome modification occurring in leaves of four GE rice lines expressing Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) genes that developed by genetic engineering and seven rice lines developed by conventional cross-breeding. The results showed that both types of crop breeding methods can bring changes at transcriptomic and metabolic levels, but the differences were comparable between the two methods, and were less than those between conventional non-GE lines. Metabolome profiling analysis found several new metabolites in GE rice lines when compared to the closest non-GE parental lines, but these compounds were also found in several of the conventionally bred rice lines. Functional analyses suggest that the differentially expressed genes and metabolites caused by both genetic engineering and conventional cross-breeding do not involve detrimental metabolic pathways. The study successfully employed RNA-sequencing and HPLC-MS technology to assess the unintended changes in new rice varieties, and the results suggest that genetic engineering does not cause unintended effects that go beyond conventional cross-breeding in rice.
Project description:The concurrent epigenetic changes during this period of remarkable improvement in maize grain yield remain unknown. Here, we performed MethylC-seq and RNA-seq on 4 related inbred lines with known pedigree information. Analysis of epigenetic changes over the course of historical maize breeding is a valuable new avenue in the exploration for crop improvement. These data lead us to suggest that novel epihaplotypes, in addition to DNA variation, are a substrate of selection during breeding, and that epigenetic variation between parents may also contribute to heterosis in hybrids. Xie, S; et al. 2013. Maize Genetics Conference Abstracts. 54:P326
Project description:Vesicular traffic and membrane contact sites between organelles enable the exchange of proteins, lipids, and metabolites. Recruitment of membrane tethers to contact sites between the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and the plasma membrane is often triggered by calcium. In contrast, we reveal here a function for calcium in the repression of cholesterol export at membrane contact sites between the ER and the Golgi complex. We show that calcium efflux from ER stores induced by inositol-triphosphate [IP3] accumulation upon loss of the inositol 5-phosphatase INPP5A or sustained receptor signaling triggers the depletion of cholesterol and associated complex glycosphingolipids from the cell surface, resulting in a blockade of clathrin-independent endocytosis (CIE) of bacterial Shiga toxin. This phenotype is caused by the calcium-induced dissociation of oxysterol binding protein (OSBP) from the Golgi complex and from VAP-containing membrane contact sites. Our findings reveal a crucial function for INPP5A-mediated IP3 hydrolysis in the control of lipid exchange at membrane contact sites.
Project description:We compare the transcriptome of gnotobiotic Ae. aegypti generated by contaminating axenic (bacteria-free) larvae with bacterial isolates found in natural mosquito breeding sites. We focused on four bacterial isolates (Lysobacter, Flavobacterium, Paenibacillus and Enterobacteriaceae) and found that different gnotobiotic treatments resulted in massive transcriptomic changes throughout the mosquito development.