bims-plasge 2025-01-26 papers

Issue of 2025–01–26
three papers selected by
Vera S. Bogdanova, ИЦиГ СО РАН

Plant Cell Rep. 2025 Jan 22. 44(2): 33

Past and future of cytoplasmic male sterility and heterosis breeding in crop plants.

Abhishek Bohra, Abha Tiwari, Shalini Pareek, Rohit Joshi, S J Satheesh Naik, Khushbu Kumari, Ram Lakhan Verma, Ashok K Parihar, Prakash G Patil, Girish P Dixit.

Plant breeding needs to embrace genetic innovations to ensure stability in crop yields under fluctuating climatic conditions. Development of commercial hybrid varieties has proven to be a sustainable and economical alternative to deliver superior yield, quality and resistance with uniformity in a number of food crops. Cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS), a maternally inherited inability to produce functional pollen, facilitates a three-line system for efficient hybrid seed production strategies in crops. The CMS system has illustrated its potential as a robust pollination control mechanism to support the billion-dollar seed industry. In plants, CMS arises due to a genomic conflict between mitochondrial open reading frames (orfs) and nuclear-encoding restoration-of-fertility (Rf) genes, leading to floral abnormalities and pollen sterility. Research on pollen sterility and fertility restoration provides deeper insights into cytoplasmic-nuclear interplay in plants and elucidates key molecular targets for hybrid breeding in crops. More recently, programmable gene editing (e.g., TALEN, CRISPR-Cas) has emerged as a promising tool to functionally validate CMS and Rf genes and obviate the need for pollen donors or Rf-genes for hybrid breeding. Modern genomic prediction models have allowed establishment of high-performing heterotic groups and patterns for sustaining long-term gain in hybrid breeding. This article reviews latest discoveries elucidating the molecular mechanisms behind CMS and fertility restoration in plants. We then present our perspective on how evolving genetic technologies are contributing to advance fundamental knowledge of the CMS-Rf genetic system for producing crop hybrids with high heterosis.

Keywords: Cytoplasmic male sterility; Fertility restoration; Heterosis; Hybrid vigour; Inheritance; Mitochondria; Seed

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-024-03414-5

bioRxiv. 2025 Jan 11. pii: 2025.01.08.631957. [Epub ahead of print]

Flipping the switch on some of the slowest mutating genomes: Direct measurements of plant mitochondrial and plastid mutation rates in msh1 mutants.

Amanda K Broz, Mychaela M Hodous, Yi Zou, Patricia C Vail, Zhiqiang Wu, Daniel B Sloan.

Plant mitochondrial and plastid genomes have exceptionally slow rates of sequence evolution, and recent work has identified an unusual member of the MutS gene family ("plant MSH1 ") as being instrumental in preventing point mutations in these genomes. However, the eXects of disrupting MSH1 -mediated DNA repair on "germline" mutation rates have not been quantified. Here, we used Arabidopsis thaliana mutation accumulation (MA) lines to measure mutation rates in msh1 mutants and matched wild type (WT) controls. We detected 124 single nucleotide variants (SNVs: 49 mitochondrial and 75 plastid) and 668 small insertions and deletions (indels: 258 mitochondrial and 410 plastid) in msh1 MA lines. In striking contrast, we did not find any organelle mutations in the WT MA lines, and reanalysis of data from a much larger WT MA experiment also failed to detect any variants. The observed number of SNVs in the msh1 MA lines corresponds to estimated mutation rates of 6.1ξ10 -7 and 3.2 ξ10 -6 per bp per generation in mitochondrial and plastid genomes, respectively. These rates exceed those of species known to have very high mitochondrial mutation rates (e.g., nematodes and fruit flies) by an order of magnitude or more and are on par with estimated rates in humans despite the generation times of A. thaliana being nearly 100-fold shorter. Therefore, disruption of a single plant-specific genetic factor in A. thaliana is suXicient to erase or even reverse the enormous diXerence in organelle mutation rates between plants and animals.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.08.631957

Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 21. 15(1): 2653

Effect of management system and pedoclimatic factors on Fusarium and Didymella communities associated with pea (Pisum sativum) roots in Germany.

Adnan Šišić, Jelena Baćanović-Šišić, Harald Schmidt, Maria R Finckh.

From 2016 to 2019, 128 organic and conventional spring and winter pea fields in Germany were surveyed to determine the effects of cropping history and pedo-climatic conditions on pea root health, the diversity of Fusarium and Didymella communities and their collective effect on pea yield. Roots generally appeared healthy or showed minor disease symptoms despite the frequent occurrence of 4 Didymella and 14 Fusarium species. Soil pH interacted with the occurrence of the Fusarium oxysporum species complex (FOSC) and F. tricinctum that correlated with reduced or increased soil pH values, respectively. While legumes in the cropping history or reduced time between legumes correlated with occurrence of D. pinodella and to a lesser degree with the members of the F. solani species complex (FSSC), the reverse was true at least in organic spring peas for F. redolens. Only in conventional systems increased root infections with F. redolens and the FSSC were linked to root rot incidence whereas yields negatively correlated with the FOSC and positively with F. tricinctum isolation frequencies. Overall, this study shows that pea root rot pathobiome is rather stable and that the damage caused is mostly due to the interaction with environmental conditions.

Keywords: Conventional agriculture; Germany; Organic agriculture; Pea root rot; Spring peas; Winter peas

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-86018-7