Comparative evolution of vegetative branching in sorghum

Tillering and secondary branching are two plastic traits with high agronomic importance, especially in terms of the ability of plants to adapt to changing environments. We describe a quantitative trait analysis of tillering and secondary branching in two novel BC1F2 populations totaling 246 genotypes derived from backcrossing two Sorghum bicolor x S. halepense F1 plants to a tetraploidized S. bicolor. A two-year, two-environment phenotypic evaluation in Bogart, GA and Salina, KS permitted us to identify major effect and environment specific QTLs. Significant correlation between tillering and secondary branching followed by discovery of overlapping sets of QTLs continue to support the developmental relationship between these two organs and suggest the possibility of pleiotropy. Comparisons with two other populations sharing S. bicolor BTx623 as a common parent but sampling the breadth of the Sorghum genus, increase confidence in QTL detected for these two plastic traits and provide insight into the evolution of morphological diversity in the Eusorghum clade. Correspondence between flowering time and vegetative branching supports other evidence in suggesting a pleiotropic effect of flowering genes. We propose a model to predict biomass weight from plant architecture related traits, quantifying contribution of each trait to biomass and providing guidance for future breeding experiments.

Europe’s evolving graduate labour markets: supply, demand, underemployment and pay

For most students the aspiration to gain employment in a graduate job is the main motivation for going to university. Whether they fulfil this aspiration depends considerably on national graduate labour markets. We analyse the comparative evolution of these markets across Europe over the decade leading up to 2015, focusing on supply, graduate/high-skilled jobs, underemployment, wages, the graduate wage premium and the penalty for underemployment. The supply of tertiary graduates increased everywhere and converged, and this upward convergence is forecast to persist. In contrast the growth of graduate jobs was slower, not ubiquitous and nonconvergent. Underemployment was spreading, though at a modest rate; this rise was convergent but not ubiquitous. The rise was most substantial in Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy and Greece. Graduates’ real wages trended predominantly downward, but varied a great deal between countries. The graduate wage premium declined by more than one percentage point in seven countries. Inferences are drawn for the formation of education policy, for the broader discourse on HE, and for research on graduate futures.

The Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War in the Tambov region: state and research prospects. Part 2. On the immediate and long-term consequences of the peasant anti-state armed protest

On continuous long lines of demographic and sociographic information, a complex of immediate and distant consequences for the Tambov region of the Civil War as a whole and especially the peasant uprising of 1920–1921 is considered. In the part of the demographic heritage we show, both direct irreversible losses of the Tambov population (death from a complex of suppressive causes, voluntary and forced emigration from the region, a drop in fertility, deformation of the age and gender balance, collapse of the population of the rural settlements, etc.) and indirect pro-longed suppression processes and the degradation of subregional aggressive rural populations that fell under the “Antonovshchina” and its suppression (social defeat of the rebellious subregions with a subsequent decline in their socio-cultural level and greater losses in World War II, shorter life expectancy, higher morbidity). Special attention is paid to the comparative evolution of the anthropometric indicators of the male parts of the populations of all Russian regions and Tambov subregions, depending on the degree of their specific defeat by the Civil War. Shows the negative impact of “Antonovshchina” and its suppression on the general cultural Soviet activity (“productivity”) of the rebellious subregions. The methods and results of the study of the all-Russian and Tambov regional material are abundantly presented graphically.

De Novo Assembly of a Chromosome-Scale Reference Genome for the Northern Flicker Colaptes auratus

ABSTRACTThe northern flicker, Colaptes auratus, is a widely distributed North American woodpecker and a long-standing focal species for the study of ecology, behavior, phenotypic differentiation, and hybridization. We present here a highly contiguous de novo genome assembly of C. auratus, the first such assembly for the species and the first published chromosome-level assembly for woodpeckers (Picidae). The assembly was generated using a combination of short-read Chromium 10x and long-read PacBio sequencing, and further scaffolded with chromatin conformation capture (Hi-C) reads. The resulting genome assembly is 1.378 Gb in size, with a scaffold N50 of 43.948 Mb and a scaffold L50 of 11. This assembly contains 87.4 % - 91.7 % of genes present across four sets of universal single-copy orthologs found in tetrapods and birds. We annotated the assembly both for genes and repetitive content, identifying 18,745 genes and a prevalence of ~ 28.0 % repetitive elements. Lastly, we used four-fold degenerate sites from neutrally evolving genes to estimate a mutation rate for C. auratus, which we estimated to be 4.007 × 10−9 substitutions / site / year, about 1.5x times faster than an earlier mutation rate estimate of the family. The highly contiguous assembly and annotations we report will serve as a resource for future studies on the genomics of C. auratus and comparative evolution of woodpeckers.

Chemical Responses to the Biotic and Abiotic Environment by Early Diverging Metazoans Revealed in the Post-Genomic Age

For many years methodological constraints limited insights on the molecular biology of non-model organisms. However, the development of various sequencing platforms has led to an explosion of transcriptomic and genomic data on non-model systems. As a consequence the molecular drivers of organismal phenotypes are becoming clearer and the chemicals that animals use to detect and respond to their environments are increasingly being revealed—this latter area inspired our symposium theme. The papers in this volume broadly address this theme by their more specific focus in one of the following general areas: 1) sensory biology and the molecular basis of perception, 2) chemicals deployed to deal with the biotic and abiotic environment, and 3) chemical interactions along the parasite–mutualist continuum. Here we outline and synthesize the content of these papers—an exercise which demonstrates that sophisticated gene repertoires enable early diverging metazoans to encode many of the signaling, sensory, defensive, and offensive capacities typically associated with animals that have complex nervous systems. We then consider opportunities and associated challenges that may delay progress in comparative functional biochemistry, a reinvigorated field that can be expected to rapidly expand with new ’omics data. Future knowledge of chemical adaptations should afford new perspectives on the comparative evolution of chemical mediators.