RESUMEN
Introduction: The husk tightness (HTI) in maize plays a crucial role in regulating the water content of ears during the maturity stage, thereby influencing the quality of mechanical grain harvesting in China. Genomic selection (GS), which employs molecular markers, offers a promising approach for identifying and selecting inbred lines with the desired HTI trait in maize breeding. However, the effectiveness of GS is contingent upon various factors, including the genetic architecture of breeding populations, sequencing platforms, and statistical models. Methods: An association panel of maize inbred lines was grown across three sites over two years, divided into four subgroups. GS analysis for HTI prediction was performed using marker data from three sequencing platforms and six marker densities with six statistical methods. Results: The findings indicate that a loosely attached husk can aid in the dissipation of water from kernels in temperate maize germplasms across most environments but not nessarily for tropical-origin maize. Considering the balance between GS prediction accuracy and breeding cost, the optimal prediction strategy is the rrBLUP model, the 50K sequencing platform, a 30% proportion of the test population, and a marker density of r2=0.1. Additionally, selecting a specific SS subgroup for sampling the testing set significantly enhances the predictive capacity for husk tightness. Discussion: The determination of the optimal GS prediction strategy for HTI provides an economically feasible reference for the practice of molecular breeding. It also serves as a reference method for GS breeding of other agronomic traits.
RESUMEN
Oridonin, obtained from the traditional Chinese herbal medicine rabdosia rubescens, exerts potent antitumor activities in cancer cells. Valproic acid (VPA), as a potent histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACI), also plays an important role in inhibition of proliferation of tumor cells. However, there are no reports so far on the cooperation between oridonin and VPA for anti-leukemic effect. Therefore, in the present study, we undertook experiments to determine whether lower concentration of oridonin in conjunction with lower concentration of VPA would produce even more encouraging synergistic effect than each of them alone, and to clarify its molecular mechanism. The results demonstrated that the lower concentration of oridonin in combination with lower concentration of VPA synergistically inhibited the proliferation of HL-60 cells, and induced obvious caspase-dependent apoptosis through activation of the intrinsic apoptosis pathway, which is involved in the downregulation of Bcl-2/Bax ratio, release of cytochrome c to cytosol and caspase-9 activation, as well as through the extrinsic apoptosis pathway mediated by Fas/FasL and caspase-8 activation. In addition, MAPK signaling pathway was also involved in apoptosis induced by oridonin plus VPA. Furthermore, the combination treatment in vivo remarkably reduced the xenograft tumor size and triggered tumor cell apoptosis. Taken together, the novel combination of oridonin plus VPA exerted synergistic anti-proliferative and apoptosis-inducing effects on human myeloid leukemia cells, and may serve as a potential promising anti-leukemia strategy.