Comparative Study of the Nutritional and Chemical Composition of New Oil Rape, Safflower and Mustard Seed Varieties Developed and Grown in Serbia.

Oilseed crops are widely cultivated and are related to nutrition and human health as valuable nutraceutical sources with valuable biological properties. The growing demand for oil plants used in human and animal nutrition or for the processing industry has contributed to the diversification and development of a new variety of oil crops. Increased oil crop diversity, besides ensuring reduced sensitivity to pests and climate conditions, has also led to improved nutritional values. In order to enable oil crop cultivation to become commercially sustainable, a comprehensive characterization of newly created varieties of oilseeds, including their nutritional and chemical composition, is required. In this study, two varieties of safflower and white and black mustard were investigated as alternative oil species for nutritional parameters, mainly protein, fat, carbohydrate, moisture, ash, polyphenols, flavonoids, chlorophylls contents, acids and mineral composition, and compared with those of two different genotypes of rapeseeds as a traditional oil crop plant. The proximate analysis found that the highest oil content was found in the oil rape NS Svetlana genotype (33.23%), while the lowest was in black mustard (25.37%). The protein content varies from around 26% in safflower samples to 34.63%, determined in white mustard. High content of unsaturated fatty acids and low content of saturated fatty acid was observed in the analyzed samples. In mineral analysis, the dominant elements were phosphorus, potassium, calcium and magnesium, in descending order. The observed oil crops are also good sources of microelements, including iron, copper, manganese and zinc, accompanied by high antioxidant activity due to the presence of significant amounts of polyphenolic and flavonoid compounds.

Crop breeding for a changing climate in the Pannonian region: towards integration of modern phenotyping tools.

The Pannonian Plain, as the most productive region of Southeast Europe, has a long tradition of agronomic production as well as agronomic research and plant breeding. Many research institutions from the agri-food sector of this region have a significant impact on agriculture. Their well-developed and fruitful breeding programmes resulted in productive crop varieties highly adapted to the specific regional environmental conditions. Rapid climatic changes that occurred during the last decades led to even more investigations of complex interactions between plants and their environments and the creation of climate-smart and resilient crops. Plant phenotyping is an essential part of botanical, biological, agronomic, physiological, biochemical, genetic, and other omics approaches. Phenotyping tools and applied methods differ among these disciplines, but all of them are used to evaluate and measure complex traits related to growth, yield, quality, and adaptation to different environmental stresses (biotic and abiotic). During almost a century-long period of plant breeding in the Pannonian region, plant phenotyping methods have changed, from simple measurements in the field to modern plant phenotyping and high-throughput non-invasive and digital technologies. In this review, we present a short historical background and the most recent developments in the field of plant phenotyping, as well as the results accomplished so far in Croatia, Hungary, and Serbia. Current status and perspectives for further simultaneous regional development and modernization of plant phenotyping are also discussed.

Brassica Species in Phytoextractions: Real Potentials and Challenges.

The genus Brassica is recognized for including species with phytoaccumulation potential and a large amount of research has been carried out in this area under a variety of conditions, from laboratory experiments to field trials, with spiked or naturally contaminated soils, using one- or multi-element contaminated soil, generating various and sometimes contradictory results with limited practical applications. To date, the actual field potential of Brassica species and the feasibility of a complete phytoextraction process have not been fully evaluated. Therefore, the aim of this study was to summarize the results of the experiments that have been performed with a view to analyzing real potentials and limitations. The reduced biomass and low metal mobility in the soil have been addressed by the development of chemically or biologically assisted phytoremediation technologies, the use of soil amendments, and the application of crop management strategies. Certain issues, such as the fate of harvested biomass or the performance of species in multi-metal-contaminated soils, remain to be solved by future research. Potential improvements to current experimental settings include testing species grown to full maturity, using a greater amount of soil in experiments, conducting more trials under real field conditions, developing improved crop management systems, and optimizing solutions for harvested biomass disposal.

Genetic Improvement in Sunflower Breeding-Integrated Omics Approach.

Foresight in climate change and the challenges ahead requires a systematic approach to sunflower breeding that will encompass all available technologies. There is a great scarcity of desirable genetic variation, which is in fact undiscovered because it has not been sufficiently researched as detection and designing favorable genetic variation largely depends on thorough genome sequencing through broad and deep resequencing. Basic exploration of genomes is insufficient to find insight about important physiological and molecular mechanisms unique to crops. That is why integrating information from genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and phenomics enables a comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms in the background of architecture of many important quantitative traits. Omics technologies offer novel possibilities for deciphering the complex pathways and molecular profiling through the level of systems biology and can provide important answers that can be utilized for more efficient breeding of sunflower. In this review, we present omics profiling approaches in order to address their possibilities and usefulness as a potential breeding tools in sunflower genetic improvement.

Targeted plant improvement through genome editing: from laboratory to field.

KEY MESSAGE: This review illustrates how far we have come since the emergence of GE technologies and how they could be applied to obtain superior and sustainable crop production. The main challenges of today's agriculture are maintaining and raising productivity, reducing its negative impact on the environment, and adapting to climate change. Efficient plant breeding can generate elite varieties that will rapidly replace obsolete ones and address ongoing challenges in an efficient and sustainable manner. Site-specific genome editing in plants is a rapidly evolving field with tangible results. The technology is equipped with a powerful toolbox of molecular scissors to cut DNA at a pre-determined site with different efficiencies for designing an approach that best suits the objectives of each plant breeding strategy. Genome editing (GE) not only revolutionizes plant biology, but provides the means to solve challenges related to plant architecture, food security, nutrient content, adaptation to the environment, resistance to diseases and production of plant-based materials. This review illustrates how far we have come since the emergence of these technologies and how these technologies could be applied to obtain superior, safe and sustainable crop production. Synergies of genome editing with other technological platforms that are gaining significance in plants lead to an exciting new, post-genomic era for plant research and production. In previous months, we have seen what global changes might arise from one new virus, reminding us of what drastic effects such events could have on food production. This demonstrates how important science, technology, and tools are to meet the current time and the future. Plant GE can make a real difference to future sustainable food production to the benefit of both mankind and our environment.

Digital Image Analysis Using FloCIA Software for Ornamental Sunflower Ray Floret Color Evaluation.

As an esthetic trait, ray floret color has a high importance in the development of new sunflower genotypes and their market value. Standard methodology for the evaluation of sunflower ray florets is based on International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) guidelines for sunflower. The major deficiency of this methodology is the necessity of high expertise from evaluators and its high subjectivity. To test the hypothesis that humans cannot distinguish colors equally, six commercial sunflower genotypes were evaluated by 100 agriculture experts, using UPOV guidelines. Moreover, the paper proposes a new methodology for sunflower ray floret color classification - digital UPOV (dUPOV), that relies on software image analysis but still leaves the final decision to the evaluator. For this purpose, we created a new Flower Color Image Analysis (FloCIA) software for sunflower ray floret digital image segmentation and automatic classification into one of the categories given by the UPOV guidelines. To assess the benefits and relevance of this method, accuracy of the newly developed software was studied by comparing 153 digital photographs of F2 genotypes with expert evaluator answers which were used as the ground truth. The FloCIA enabled visualizations of segmentation of ray floret images of sunflower genotypes used in the study, as well as two dominant color clusters, percentages of pixels belonging to each UPOV color category with graphical representation in the CIE (International Commission on Illumination) L∗a∗b∗ (or simply Lab) color space in relation to the mean vectors of the UPOV category. Precision (repeatability) of ray flower color determination was greater between dUPOV based expert color evaluation and software evaluation than between two UPOV based evaluations performed by the same expert. The accuracy of FloCIA software used for unsupervised (automatic) classification was 91.50% on the image dataset containing 153 photographs of F2 genotypes. In this case, the software and the experts had classified 140 out of 153 of images in the same color categories. This visual presentation can serve as a guideline for evaluators to determine the dominant color and to conclude if more than one significant color exists in the examined genotype.

Analysis of oilseed rape stem weevil chemical control using a damage rating scale.

BACKGROUND: Rape stem weevil (Ceutorhynchus napi Gyll.) and cabbage stem weevil (C. pallidactylus Marsh.) can cause significant yield losses to oilseed rape (Brassica napus L.), and chemical control is often needed to protect crops from these pests. The efficacy of six insecticides, chlorpyriphos + cypermethrin, bifenthrin, alpha-cypermethrin, pirimiphos-methyl, thiacloprid and tau-fluvalinate, was tested in a 4 year field trial. Besides the standard efficacy analysis expressed through the number of larvae per stem, a damage rating scale was introduced and modelled using a regression model for ordinal categorical data. RESULTS: Compared with the control, expressed through damage rating and larval number, treatments with chlorpyriphos + cypermethrin and bifenthrin, showed higher efficacy in the control of stem weevils compared with alpha-cypermethrin and pirimiphos-methyl. The lowest efficacy was observed in treatments with tau-fluvalinate and thiacloprid. CONCLUSION: This study showed that a combined efficacy evaluation expressed through both damage rating scale and the count of larvae, supported by an ordinal regression model for data analysis, is indispensable for obtaining accurate results. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry.