Soybean is one of the most important oilseed and fodder crops. Benefiting from the efforts of soybean breeders and the development of breeding technology, large number of germplasm has been generated over the last 100 years. Nevertheless, soybean breeding needs to be accelerated to meet the needs of a growing world population, to promote sustainable agriculture and to address future environmental changes. The acceleration is highly reliant on the discoveries in gene functional studies.

In this article, we describe the development of the plant immunity field, starting with efforts to understand the genetic basis for disease resistance, which ∼30 y ago led to the discovery of diverse classes of immune receptors that recognize and respond to infectious microbes. We focus on knowledge gained from studies of the rice XA21 immune receptor that recognizes RaxX (required for activation of XA21 mediated immunity X), a sulfated microbial peptide secreted by the gram-negative bacterium Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae. XA21 is representative of a large class of plant and animal immune receptors that recognize and respond to conserved microbial molecules.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) supersaturation in lakes and rivers worldwide is commonly attributed to terrestrial–aquatic transfers of organic and inorganic carbon (C) and subsequent, in situ aerobic respiration. Methane (CH₄) production and oxidation also contribute CO₂ to freshwaters, yet this remains largely unquantified. Flood pulse lakes and rivers in the tropics are hypothesized to receive large inputs of dissolved CO₂ and CH₄ from floodplains characterized by hypoxia and reducing conditions.

Cultivars with durable resistance are the most popular means to control wheat stripe rust. Durable resistance can be achieved by stacking multiple adult plant resistance (APR) genes that individually have relatively small effect. Chinese wheat cultivars Ruihua 520 (RH520) and Fengdecun 12 (FDC12) confer partial APR to stripe rust across environments. One hundred and seventy recombinant inbred lines from the cross RH520 × FDC12 were used to determine the genetic basis of resistance and identify genomic regions associated with stripe rust resistance

Plants have evolved sophisticated defense systems to enhance drought tolerance. These include the microRNA (miRNA) group of small noncoding RNAs that act as post-transcriptional regulators; however, details of the mechanisms by which they confer drought tolerance are not well understood. Here, we show that osa-MIR171f, a member of osa-MIR171 gene family, is mainly expressed in response to drought stress and regulates the transcript levels of SCARECROW-LIKE6-I (SCL6-I) and SCL6-II in rice (Oryza sativa)

Soybean cyst nematode (SCN, Heterodera glycines Ichinohe) is the most economically damaging pathogen affecting soybean production worldwide. Host-induced gene silencing provides a promising approach to confer resistance to plant parasitic nematodes. In the present study, we produced stable transgenic soybean plants individually harboring the inverted repeats of three essential H. glycines genes, Hg-rps23, Hg-snb1, and Hg-cpn1, and evaluated their resistance to SCN infection.

Grain size and weight are crucial components of wheat yield. Dissection of their genetic control is thus essential for the improvement of yield potential in wheat breeding. We used a doubled haploid (DH) population to detect quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for grain width (GW), grain length (GL), and thousand grain weight (TGW) in five environments. Six major QTLs, QGw.cib-4B.2, QGl.cib-4A, QGl.cib-5A.1, QGl.cib-6A, QTgw.cib-4B, and QTgw.cib-5A, were consistently identified in at least three individual environments and in best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) datasets,

Bacteria use surface appendages called type IV pili to perform diverse activities including DNA uptake, twitching motility, and attachment to surfaces. The dynamic extension and retraction of pili are often required for these activities, but the stimuli that regulate these dynamics remain poorly characterized. To address this question, we study the bacterial pathogen Vibrio cholerae, which uses mannose-sensitive hemagglutinin (MSHA) pili to attach to surfaces in aquatic environments as the first step in biofilm formation.

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) produces a wide range of volatile chemicals during fruit ripening, generating a distinct aroma and contributing to the overall flavor. Among these volatiles are several aromatic and aliphatic nitrogen-containing compounds for which the biosynthetic pathways are not known. While nitrogenous volatiles are abundant in tomato fruit, their content in fruits of the closely related species of the tomato clade is highly variable.

Vegetative storage proteins (VSPs) are known to serve as nitrogen reserves in many dicot plants but remain undiscovered in grasses, most widely grown group of crops globally. We identified and characterized a VSP in maize and demonstrated that its overexpression improved drought tolerance. Nitrogen supplementation selectively induced a mesophyll lipoxygenase (ZmLOX6), which was targeted to chloroplasts by a novel N-terminal transit peptide of 62 amino acids.