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Seed size and weight are key traits determining crop yield, which often undergo strongly artificial selection during crop domestication. Although seed sizes differ significantly between oil flax and fiber flax, the genetic basis of morphological differences and artificial selection characteristics in seed size remains largely unclear. Here we resequenced 200 flax cultivated accessions to generate a genome variation map based on chromosome assembly reference genomes. We provide evidence that oil flax group is the ancestor of cultivated flax, and the oil-fiber dual purpose group (OF) is the evolutionary intermediate transition state between oil and fiber flax. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) were combined with LD Heatmap to identify candidate regions related to seed size and weight, then candidate genes were screened based on detailed functional annotations and estimation of nucleotide polymorphism effects. Using this strategy, we obtained 13 candidate genes related to seed size and weight. Selective sweeps analysis indicates human-involved selection of small seeds during the oil to fiber flax transition. Our study shows the existence of elite alleles for seed size and weight in flax germplasm and provides molecular insights into approaches for further improvement.

ABA has been found to play a significant role in post-embryonic developmental in peanut seedlings. The results from the current study indicate that in the presence of exogenous 10 lmol l -1 ABA, lateral roots (LRs) number decreased and seedling development was delayed. This effect was eliminated by 25 lmol l -1 naproxen, an inhibitor of ABA biosynthesis. The Arabidopsis mutant deficient in ABA biosynthesis, nced3, displays a phenotype with more and longer LRs. We found that ABA decreased rootbranching in peanut in a dose-dependent way. ABA-treated seedlings showed higher endogenous ABA levels than the control and naproxen-treated seedlings. RT-PCR results indicated that the expression of AhNCED1, a key gene in the ABA biosynthetic pathway, was significantly up-regulated by exogenous ABA in peanut. The mRNA levels of AhNCED1 began to increase 2 days after ABA treatment. The results from the current study show that ABA inhibits peanut LR development by increasing endogenous ABA contents.

Indoor localization technique has received much attention in recent years. Many techniques have been developed to solve the problem. Among the recent proposed methods, radio frequency identification (RFID) indoor localization technology has the advantages of low-cost, noncontact, non-line-of-sight, and high precision. This paper proposed two radial basis function (RBF) neural network based indoor localization methods. The RBF neural networks are trained to learn the mapping relationship between received signal strength indication values and position of objects. Traditional method used the received signal strength directly as the input of neural network; we added another input channel by taking the difference of the received signal strength, thus improving the reliability and precision of positioning. Fuzzy clustering is used to determine the center of radial basis function. In order to reduce the impact of signal fading due to non-line-of-sight and multipath transmission in indoor environment, we improved the Gaussian filter to process received signal strength values. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods as well as improves the reliability and precision of the RFID indoor positioning system.

The phytochemical composition and antioxidant activity of fruits are associated with their health benefits. Longan is a traditional Chinese edible and medicinal fruit, but its varietal differences in phytochemical profiles and antioxidant activity were unknown. Twenty-four longan cultivars from southern China were investigated in this study. Their total phenolic and flavonoid contents in pulp were 22.09-132.47 mg gallic acid equivalents/100 g and 2.48-14.26 mg catechin equivalents/100 g, respectively. The mean contributions of free phenolics and flavonoids to the total were 82.5% and 94.0%, respectively. Among 10 individual phenolics detected by HPLC, the contents of epicatechin, 4-methylcatechol, chlorogenic, and vanillic acids were relatively higher. The cellular antioxidant activity (CAA) of longan pulp showed significant varietal discrepancies and positive correlation with phenolic and flavonoid contents. Phenolics in longan pulp of 24 cultivars showed lower CAA potential than many other fruits with the CAA qualities from 0.35 to 1.21 µmol quercetin equivalent/100 µmol total phenolics. Longan cultivars were classified into six groups by hierarchical clustering analysis. Six cultivars in group 4 and 6 had higher phytochemical contents and CAA activity. ARTICLE HISTORY

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