Aerial surfaces of terrestrial plants are protected from the uncontrolled loss of water and gas by the cuticle, a membrane of fatty acid polymers on the outer surface of epidermal cells. Composed of cutin and waxes, the cuticle protects against a wide range of external stresses and has an important role in plant development and reproduction. Plants with reduced cuticular waxes often exhibit glossy, bright green leaves, which in rice are only observed in the presence of water adhesion. In this study, a wet leaf/glossy (wlg) mutant KDS-2249D was subjected to targeted exon capture and sequencing to identify candidate mutations. A single nonsynonymous, homozygous mutation was found in the KDS-2249D mutant. The mutation (G1080A) is predicted to change a tryptophan at position 360 to a stop codon in the
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Climate change has imposed greater challenge on cowpea production in the savannah ecology of West Africa sub-region in the recent time, however, development of varieties that combined resilience (stability) and precocity with high seed yield would be a sustainable approach to mitigate this problem. To this end, nine advanced breeding lines were evaluated along with two commercial varieties across three locations in guinea savannah ecology, using a randomized complete block design of three replications. Results obtained for seed yield and yield components indicate that the eleven cowpeas exhibited substantial variability for all plant traits studied and implications discussed. Additive Main Effect and Multiplicative Interaction (AMMI) analysis however revealed that the variations recorded were substantially attributable to genotypic component (70–80%) and less of environment (0.7–7.0%), a measure of phenotypic stability of these cowpea lines. However, seed yield and yield components vary significantly across the three locations, which further emphasize the important role of soil and climatic variables to cowpea production. In this study, two varieties (IT07K-299-6 and IT11K-61-82) consistently combined high seed yield (> 2 tons/ha) with precocity across the three locations, and could be multiplied for distribution to farmers as short-term intervention for yield increase. Reduced seed viability of these varieties reflects seed storage challenge in cowpea farming. In addition to significant contributions of some yield components to seed yield, there was evidence of strong association between precocity and high yield, and its implication for cowpea improvement discussed.
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AT-hook proteins are known to co-regulate transcription of genes through the modification of chromatin architecture. In plants, many genes encoding AT-hook proteins have been shown to be associated with increased seed yield or delayed senescence. In this study, we produced transgenic soybean plants overexpressing chromatin architecture-controlling
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Phosphate is one of the major nutrients of growth, development, and reproduction of crop plants and functions in energy metabolism, signal transduction cascades, and regulates enzymatic activities. To understand uptake and usage of this nutrient in
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Although genomics provides useful tools for crops, most wild resource plants still lack molecular data. To retrieve useful genomic data and thus provide fundamental information for a resource plant, we established a multi-directional approach using two low coverage whole-genome shotgun sequence (WGS) data of
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The
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Simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were developed from
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