An adaptive teosinte mexicana introgression modulates phosphatidylcholine levels and is associated with maize flowering time.

Native Americans domesticated maize (Zea mays ssp. mays) from lowland teosinte parviglumis (Zea mays ssp. parviglumis) in the warm Mexican southwest and brought it to the highlands of Mexico and South America where it was exposed to lower temperatures that imposed strong selection on flowering time. Phospholipids are important metabolites in plant responses to low-temperature and phosphorus availability and have been suggested to influence flowering time. Here, we combined linkage mapping with genome scans to identify High PhosphatidylCholine 1 (HPC1), a gene that encodes a phospholipase A1 enzyme, as a major driver of phospholipid variation in highland maize. Common garden experiments demonstrated strong genotype-by-environment interactions associated with variation at HPC1, with the highland HPC1 allele leading to higher fitness in highlands, possibly by hastening flowering. The highland maize HPC1 variant resulted in impaired function of the encoded protein due to a polymorphism in a highly conserved sequence. A meta-analysis across HPC1 orthologs indicated a strong association between the identity of the amino acid at this position and optimal growth in prokaryotes. Mutagenesis of HPC1 via genome editing validated its role in regulating phospholipid metabolism. Finally, we showed that the highland HPC1 allele entered cultivated maize by introgression from the wild highland teosinte Zea mays ssp. mexicana and has been maintained in maize breeding lines from the Northern United States, Canada, and Europe. Thus, HPC1 introgressed from teosinte mexicana underlies a large metabolic QTL that modulates phosphatidylcholine levels and has an adaptive effect at least in part via induction of early flowering time.

Sequencing analysis of 20,000 full-length cDNA clones from cassava reveals lineage specific expansions in gene families related to stress response.

BACKGROUND: Cassava, an allotetraploid known for its remarkable tolerance to abiotic stresses is an important source of energy for humans and animals and a raw material for many industrial processes. A full-length cDNA library of cassava plants under normal, heat, drought, aluminum and post harvest physiological deterioration conditions was built; 19968 clones were sequence-characterized using expressed sequence tags (ESTs). RESULTS: The ESTs were assembled into 6355 contigs and 9026 singletons that were further grouped into 10577 scaffolds; we found 4621 new cassava sequences and 1521 sequences with no significant similarity to plant protein databases. Transcripts of 7796 distinct genes were captured and we were able to assign a functional classification to 78% of them while finding more than half of the enzymes annotated in metabolic pathways in Arabidopsis. The annotation of sequences that were not paired to transcripts of other species included many stress-related functional categories showing that our library is enriched with stress-induced genes. Finally, we detected 230 putative gene duplications that include key enzymes in reactive oxygen species signaling pathways and could play a role in cassava stress response features. CONCLUSION: The cassava full-length cDNA library here presented contains transcripts of genes involved in stress response as well as genes important for different areas of cassava research. This library will be an important resource for gene discovery, characterization and cloning; in the near future it will aid the annotation of the cassava genome.

Identification of Cassava MicroRNAs under Abiotic Stress.

The study of microRNAs (miRNAs) in plants has gained significant attention in recent years due to their regulatory role during development and in response to biotic and abiotic stresses. Although cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) is tolerant to drought and other adverse conditions, most cassava miRNAs have been predicted using bioinformatics alone or through sequencing of plants challenged by biotic stress. Here, we use high-throughput sequencing and different bioinformatics methods to identify potential cassava miRNAs expressed in different tissues subject to heat and drought conditions. We identified 60 miRNAs conserved in other plant species and 821 potential cassava-specific miRNAs. We also predicted 134 and 1002 potential target genes for these two sets of sequences. Using real time PCR, we verified the condition-specific expression of 5 cassava small RNAs relative to a non-stress control. We also found, using publicly available expression data, a significantly lower expression of the predicted target genes of conserved and nonconserved miRNAs under drought stress compared to other cassava genes. Gene Ontology enrichment analysis along with condition specific expression of predicted miRNA targets, allowed us to identify several interesting miRNAs which may play a role in stress-induced posttranscriptional regulation in cassava and other plants.