Reviewing the essential roles of remote phenotyping, GWAS and explainable AI in practical marker-assisted selection for drought-tolerant winter wheat breeding.

Marker-assisted selection (MAS) plays a crucial role in crop breeding improving the speed and precision of conventional breeding programmes by quickly and reliably identifying and selecting plants with desired traits. However, the efficacy of MAS depends on several prerequisites, with precise phenotyping being a key aspect of any plant breeding programme. Recent advancements in high-throughput remote phenotyping, facilitated by unmanned aerial vehicles coupled to machine learning, offer a non-destructive and efficient alternative to traditional, time-consuming, and labour-intensive methods. Furthermore, MAS relies on knowledge of marker-trait associations, commonly obtained through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), to understand complex traits such as drought tolerance, including yield components and phenology. However, GWAS has limitations that artificial intelligence (AI) has been shown to partially overcome. Additionally, AI and its explainable variants, which ensure transparency and interpretability, are increasingly being used as recognised problem-solving tools throughout the breeding process. Given these rapid technological advancements, this review provides an overview of state-of-the-art methods and processes underlying each MAS, from phenotyping, genotyping and association analyses to the integration of explainable AI along the entire workflow. In this context, we specifically address the challenges and importance of breeding winter wheat for greater drought tolerance with stable yields, as regional droughts during critical developmental stages pose a threat to winter wheat production. Finally, we explore the transition from scientific progress to practical implementation and discuss ways to bridge the gap between cutting-edge developments and breeders, expediting MAS-based winter wheat breeding for drought tolerance.

Values in tension. Clinical quality and civic participation in umbilical cord blood banking in Italy.

In the dominant narrative of bioethics and biomedical discourse on public Umbilical Cord Blood (UCB) banking, the ethical value of donating UCB is unproblematically associated with the clinical quality of collected UCB. This article shows that this view is analytically untenable as it overlooks tensions and conflicts between the social values of donation and the clinical value of banked UCB in concrete arrangements regarding the logistics of UCB donation and collection. Adopting the notion of registers of valuing (Heuts and Mol 2013: Valuation Studies, 1, 2, 125-46) and analysing the case of the Italian network of public UCB banks and collection sites, this article shows how conflicting registers of valuing concerning UCB can shape different organisational models of UCB donation and collection, in which social values and clinical value are not unproblematically conflated. The article aims to demonstrate that the functioning of biobanking arrangements is dependent on how different values are accomplished and aligned in concrete practices of tissue donation and collection.

'It's a family affair': The discursive entanglement of social formations in public and private cord blood banking in Italy.

The dominant narrative in bioethical and biomedical literature criticises private/family cord blood banking as selling a biomedical service that challenges the system of public banks that is based on voluntary donations and distributing umbilical cord blood for medical needs. While the public system is described as embedded in the social relations of reciprocity, solidarity and obligation to the collectivity, private/family banking is accused of being a for-profit commercial market that exploits the emotional vulnerabilities of parents with exaggerated and misleading claims about the clinical uses of umbilical cord blood. This article challenges this view by showing that both banking systems are embedded in social relations. It analyses the discourses produced by Italian public and private umbilical cord blood banks and by healthcare institutions to show how these discourses constitute different social formations and attach diverging meanings of umbilical cord blood banking and clinical use to the set of responsibilities, values and obligations characterising these formations.

The Italian Way to Stem Cell Research: Rethinking the Role of Catholic Religion in Shaping Italian Stem Cell Research Regulations.

Stem cell research regulations are highly variable across nations, notwithstanding shared and common ethical concerns. Dominant in political debates has been the so-called embryo question. However, the permissibility of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research varies among national regulatory frameworks. Scholars have explained differences by resorting to notions of political culture, traditions of ethical reasoning, discursive strategies and political manoeuvring of involved actors. Explanations based on the role of religion or other cultural structural variables are also employed. This paper analyses the emerging of the Italian regulatory framework on stem cell research using an analytical framework that considers the interplay between cultural structural features, political culture, traditions of ethical reasoning, institutional settings and the discursive and political agency of the actors involved. It aims also to explain the role of Roman Catholic Church in shaping the Italian stem cell research regulation not by treating religion as an autonomous causal factor, but through the analysis of the agency of Catholic and allied actors in the Italian political culture and institutional setting.

When the oocyte becomes an embryo. The social life of an ambiguous scientific image in Italian newspapers (1996-2007).

This paper analyses the social life of a scientific image frequently used in media coverage of human genetic and biotechnology issues. The expression "social life of an image" refers to the set of functions performed in the public sphere and the relations interweaved with narratives and discourses. This paper starts from the assumption that the sense of an image is reflexive to its local contexts of use. Therefore, the social meaning of an image relies on the web of discursive links which constitute its social life. The paper explores the functions performed by a photograph of a fertilized oocyte in Italian media coverage of human genetic issues. We conclude asserting that such an image: (a) acts as a visual link between several controversial issues; (b) it has become the icon of a general master-frame of human genetics issues and (c) it takes a not neutral part in the debates over these issues.