Estimating Sink Parameters of Stochastic Functional-Structural Plant Models Using Organic Series-Continuous and Rhythmic Development.

Functional-structural plant models (FSPMs) generally simulate plant development and growth at the level of individual organs (leaves, flowers, internodes, etc.). Parameters that are not directly measurable, such as the sink strength of organs, can be estimated inversely by fitting the weights of organs along an axis (organic series) with the corresponding model output. To accommodate intracanopy variability among individual plants, stochastic FSPMs have been built by introducing the randomness in plant development; this presents a challenge in comparing model output and experimental data in parameter estimation since the plant axis contains individual organs with different amounts and weights. To achieve model calibration, the interaction between plant development and growth is disentangled by first computing the occurrence probabilities of each potential site of phytomer, as defined in the developmental model (potential structure). On this basis, the mean organic series is computed analytically to fit the organ-level target data. This process is applied for plants with continuous and rhythmic development simulated with different development parameter sets. The results are verified by Monte-Carlo simulation. Calibration tests are performed both in silico and on real plants. The analytical organic series are obtained for both continuous and rhythmic cases, and they match well with the results from Monte-Carlo simulation, and vice versa. This fitting process works well for both the simulated and real data sets; thus, the proposed method can solve the source-sink functions of stochastic plant architectures through a simplified approach to plant sampling. This work presents a generic method for estimating the sink parameters of a stochastic FSPM using statistical organ-level data, and it provides a method for sampling stems. The current work breaks a bottleneck in the application of FSPMs to real plants, creating the opportunity for broad applications.

Genotyping-by-sequencing provides the first well-resolved phylogeny for coffee (Coffea) and insights into the evolution of caffeine content in its species: GBS coffee phylogeny and the evolution of caffeine content.

A comprehensive and meaningful phylogenetic hypothesis for the commercially important coffee genus (Coffea) has long been a key objective for coffee researchers. For molecular studies, progress has been limited by low levels of sequence divergence, leading to insufficient topological resolution and statistical support in phylogenetic trees, particularly for the major lineages and for the numerous species occurring in Madagascar. We report here the first almost fully resolved, broadly sampled phylogenetic hypothesis for coffee, the result of combining genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) technology with a newly developed, lab-based workflow to integrate short read next-generation sequencing for low numbers of additional samples. Biogeographic patterns indicate either Africa or Asia (or possibly the Arabian Peninsula) as the most likely ancestral locality for the origin of the coffee genus, with independent radiations across Africa, Asia, and the Western Indian Ocean Islands (including Madagascar and Mauritius). The evolution of caffeine, an important trait for commerce and society, was evaluated in light of our phylogeny. High and consistent caffeine content is found only in species from the equatorial, fully humid environments of West and Central Africa, possibly as an adaptive response to increased levels of pest predation. Moderate caffeine production, however, evolved at least one additional time recently (between 2 and 4Mya) in a Madagascan lineage, which suggests that either the biosynthetic pathway was already in place during the early evolutionary history of coffee, or that caffeine synthesis within the genus is subject to convergent evolution, as is also the case for caffeine synthesis in coffee versus tea and chocolate.

Partial sequencing reveals the transposable element composition of Coffea genomes and provides evidence for distinct evolutionary stories.

The Coffea genus, 124 described species, has a natural distribution spreading from inter-tropical Africa, to Western Indian Ocean Islands, India, Asia and up to Australasia. Two cultivated species, C. arabica and C. canephora, are intensively studied while, the breeding potential and the genome composition of all the wild species remained poorly uncharacterized. Here, we report the characterization and comparison of the highly repeated transposable elements content of 11 Coffea species representatives of the natural biogeographic distribution. A total of 994 Mb from 454 reads were produced with a genome coverage ranging between 3.2 and 15.7 %. The analyses showed that highly repeated transposable elements, mainly LTR retrotransposons (LTR-RT), represent between 32 and 53 % of Coffea genomes depending on their biogeographic location and genome size. Species from West and Central Africa (Eucoffea) contained the highest LTR-RT content but with no strong variation relative to their genome size. At the opposite, for the insular species (Mascarocoffea), a strong variation of LTR-RT was observed suggesting differential dynamics of these elements in this group. Two LTR-RT lineages, SIRE and Del were clearly differentially accumulated between African and insular species, suggesting these lineages were associated to the genome divergence of Coffea species in Africa. Altogether, the information obtained in this study improves our knowledge and brings new data on the composition, the evolution and the divergence of wild Coffea genomes.

Terminal-repeat retrotransposons with GAG domain in plant genomes: a new testimony on the complex world of transposable elements.

A novel structure of nonautonomous long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons called terminal repeat with GAG domain (TR-GAG) has been described in plants, both in monocotyledonous, dicotyledonous and basal angiosperm genomes. TR-GAGs are relatively short elements in length (<4 kb) showing the typical features of LTR-retrotransposons. However, they carry only one open reading frame coding for the GAG precursor protein involved for instance in transposition, the assembly, and the packaging of the element into the virus-like particle. GAG precursors show similarities with both Copia and Gypsy GAG proteins, suggesting evolutionary relationships of TR-GAG elements with both families. Despite the lack of the enzymatic machinery required for their mobility, strong evidences suggest that TR-GAGs are still active. TR-GAGs represent ubiquitous nonautonomous structures that could be involved in the molecular diversities of plant genomes.