(Press-News.org)
Blueberry, a common Vaccinium species with small-sized berries, is known for its delicious taste, balanced sweetness and acidity, and rich nutritional content. It is abundant in various vitamins and antioxidants. However, the limited genetic resources for cultivated blueberries have significantly hindered their development and utilization. Therefore, utilizing wild blueberries' genetic resources for breeding is paramount to enhancing the resilience and quality of cultivated varieties.
Vaccinium duclouxii, native to the southwestern region of China, is an endemic wild blueberry species with high nutritional, medicinal, and ornamental value. It also exhibits strong resistance and environmental adaptability. However, the lack of a high-quality genome severely constrains its application and development.
In October 2023, Horticulture Research published a perspective entitled by "The Telomere-to-telomere gap-free reference genome of wild blueberry (Vaccinium duclouxii) provides its high soluble sugar and anthocyanin accumulation".
This study employed PacBio HiFi, ONT ultra-long, and Hi-C sequencing data for telomere-to-telomere (T2T) de novo assembly of the V. duclouxii genome. The assembled genome size was 573.67 Mb, successfully capturing all 12 gapless chromosomes, with a total annotation of 41,953 genes. Repetitive sequences accounted for 54.84%, yielding the most complete and high-quality genome for the Vaccinium genus. By integrating transcriptomic and metabolomic analyses, the study revealed the molecular mechanisms underlying sugar and acid accumulation and anthocyanin biosynthesis during the ripening of V. duclouxii. This research lays a foundation for understanding the evolution of the Vaccinium genus and provides valuable insights for future genetic improvement and breeding efforts in blueberries.
###
References
Authors
Zeng T, He ZJ, He JF, Lv W, Huang SX, Li JW, Zhu LY, Wan S, Zhou WF, Yang ZS, Zhang YT, Luo C, He JW, Wang CY, Wang LS
Affiliations
1 School of Life Sciences, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang 550000, China;
2 Institute of Alpine Economic Plant, Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Lijiang 674199, Yunnan, China;
3 School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences, Peking University, 100871 Beijing, China;
4 National Key Laboratory for Germplasm Innovation & Utilization of Horticultural Crops, College of Horticulture & Forestry Sciences, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China;
5 Wuhan Benagen Technology Co., Ltd, Wuhan 430070, China;
6 Key Laboratory of Plant Resources, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China.
About Caiyun Wang
Caiyun Wang: professor at the College of Horticulture and Forestry Sciences, Huazhong Agricultural University
END
Chinese and Russian cooperation has grown significantly in the past three decades thanks to joint work on energy trade, politics and official visits, analysis shows.
There was a ‘limited’ Sino–Russian cooperation intensity in 1992–1995, which grew from then until 2007 and then rose. The bilateral relationship grew progressively, with no exponential growth or peaks, according to the study.
There were no or dramatic changes following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
The ...
A team of investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have developed a non-invasive genetic test that can screen the blood of pregnant individuals to survey all genes for fetal DNA sequence variants. The team evaluated the test by examining blood samples from 51 pregnant persons, finding that the test was able to capture variants that were inherited from the mother as well as new variants that were not present in the mother and associated with prenatal diagnoses. ...
“Our study may reveal previously uncharacterized population-specific variants that may increase the risk of BC in the Kazakh population.”
BUFFALO, NY- November 22, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on October 4, 2023, entitled, “Determination of genetic predisposition to early breast cancer in women of Kazakh ethnicity.”
Breast cancer (BC) is the most common type of cancer among women in Kazakhstan. To date, little data are available on the spectrum of genetic variation in Kazakh women with BC.
In this new study, researchers Gulnur Zhunussova, Nazgul Omarbayeva, ...
“Our ultimate goal is to find existing FDA-approved drugs and dietary supplements that can not only increase lifespan but also improve healthspan.”
BUFFALO, NY- November 22, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 21, entitled, “Antibiotics that target mitochondria extend lifespan in C. elegans.”
Aging is a continuous degenerative process caused by a progressive decline of cell and tissue functions in an organism. It is induced by the accumulation of damage that affects normal cellular processes, ...
EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2022
MINNEAPOLIS – Black people who eat more foods with whole grains, including some breads and cereals, quinoa, and popcorn, may have a slower rate of memory decline compared to Black people who eat fewer whole grain foods, according to a study published in the November 22, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The researchers did not see a similar trend in white participants.
The study does not prove that eating more whole grains slows memory decline; it only shows an association.
The study found that among Black ...
An article by researchers at the Center for Development of Functional Materials (CDMF) in Brazil describes a successful strategy to mitigate charge capacity loss in vanadium redox flow batteries, which are used by electric power utilities among other industries and can accumulate large amounts of energy. The article is published in the Chemical Engineering Journal.
CDMF is a Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center (RIDC) funded by FAPESP and hosted by the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in São Paulo state.
The study involved computer ...
A new publication from Opto-Electronic Advances, 10.29026/oea.2023.230140 discusses photonic integrated neuro-synaptic core for convolutional spiking neural network.
Brain science and brain-like intelligence are the cutting-edge science and technology that countries all over the world compete to seize. The rapid rise and vigorous development of emerging fields such as artificial intelligence, 5G/6G, big data, autonomous driving, and the Internet of Things has led to the explosive growth of global data. Due to the memory wall effect, the conventional von Neumann architecture performs low energy efficiency. Electronic ...
A new publication from Opto-Electronic Science; DOI 10.29026/oes.2023.230021 overviews multi-synaptic photonic SNN based on a DFB-SA chip.
Compared with traditional artificial neural networks, spiking neural networks (SNN) are more biologically authentic, more powerful, and less power-consuming due to their spatiotemporal coding and event-driven characteristics. In recent years, optical computing has been widely considered as a hardware acceleration platform, where nonlinear computing poses a challenge. Photonic SNN provides an ultra-fast and energy-efficient platform for high-performance ...
A new publication from Opto-Electronic Science; DOI 10.29026/oes.2023.230019 overviews optical trapping of optical nanoparticles.
This article reviews the fundamentals and applications of optically trapped optical nanoparticles. Optical nanoparticles are nowadays one of the key elements of photonics. They do not only allow optical imaging of a plethora of systems (from cells to microelectronics), but also behave as highly sensitive remote sensors. In recent years, it has been demonstrated the success of optical tweezers in isolating and manipulating individual optical nanoparticles. This has opened the door to high resolution single particle scanning ...
The Iron Age site of Casas del Turuñuelo was used repeatedly for ritualized animal sacrifice, according to a multidisciplinary study published November 22, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mª Pilar Iborra Eres of the Institut Valencià de Conservació, Restauració i Investigació, Spain, Sebastián Celestino Pérez of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain, and their colleagues.
Archaeological sites with evidence of major animal sacrifices are rarely ...
