Rye is a valuable food and forage crop, an important genetic resource for wheat and triticale improvement and an indispensable material for efficient comparative genomic studies in grasses. Here, we sequenced the genome of Weining rye, an elite Chinese rye variety. The assembled contigs (7.74 Gb) accounted for 98.47% of the estimated genome size (7.86 Gb), with 93.67% of the contigs (7.25 Gb) assigned to seven chromosomes. Repetitive elements constituted 90.31% of the assembled genome. Compared to previously sequenced Triticeae genomes, Daniela, Sumaya and Sumana retrotransposons showed strong expansion in rye. Further analyses of the Weining assembly shed new light on genome-wide gene duplications and their impact on starch biosynthesis genes, physical organization of complex prolamin loci, gene expression features underlying early heading trait and putative domestication-associated chromosomal regions and loci in rye. This genome sequence promises to accelerate genomic and breeding studies in rye and related cereal crops.

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Synchronous gastric tumors that consist of both gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) and adenocarcinoma are rare. We studied the clinicopathological and molecular characteristics of six cases containing both gastric adenocarcinoma and GIST. By means of immunohistochemical analysis, all GIST cells expressed CD117, CD34 and Dog1 in all six synchronous gastric adenocarcinomas with GIST, and in GIST alone. Sequencing analysis demonstrated that exon 11 c-kit mutations were present in two of six synchronous tumors and four of five GISTs. One of the two exon 11 c-kit mutations in synchronous adenocarcinomas with GISTs was an uncommon mutation of CTT > CCA at amino acid 576, and the other was a GTT deletion at amino acid 560. The mutation was a homozygous A > G mutation in exon 12 (amino acid 567) of PDGFR-α. We concluded that the exon 11 mutations were the most important in both cases of synchronous gastric adenocarcinoma with GIST and GIST alone. The mutation rate was higher in GIST alone than in synchronous adenocarcinoma with GIST.

Background: Neoadjuvant radiotherapy is a commonly used method for the current standard-of-care for most patients with rectal cancer, when the effects of radioresistance are limited. The phosphatidylinositol transfer protein, cytoplasmic 1 (PITPNC1), a lipid-metabolism-related gene, has previously been proved to manifest pro-cancer effects in multiple types of cancer. However, whether PITPNC1 plays a role for developing radioresistance in rectal cancer patients is still unknown. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the role of PITPNC1 in rectal cancer radioresistance.Methods: Patient-derived tissue were used to detect the difference in the expression level of PITPNC1 between radioresistant and radiosensitive patients. Bioinformatic analyses of high-throughput gene expression data were applied to uncover the correlations between PITPNC1 level and oxidative stress. Two rectal cancer cell lines, SW620, and HCT116, were selected in vitro to investigate the effect of PITPNC1 on radioresistance, reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation, apoptosis, and proliferation in rectal cancer.Results: PITPNC1 is highly expressed in radioresistant patient-derived rectal cancer tissues compared to radiosensitive tissue; therefore, PITPNC1 inhibits the generation of ROS and improves the extent of radioresistance of rectal cancer cell lines and then inhibits apoptosis. Knocking down PITPNC1 facilitates the production of ROS while application of the ROS scavenger, N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC), could reverse this effect.Conclusions: PITPNC1 fuels radioresistance of rectal cancer via the inhibition of ROS generation.