Food-based components represent major sources of functional bioactive compounds. Milk is a rich source of multiple bioactive peptides that not only help to fulfill consumers ‘nutritional requirements but also play a significant role in preventing several health disorders. Understanding the chemical composition of milk and its products is critical for producing consistent and high-quality dairy products and functional dairy ingredients. Over the last two decades, peptides have gained significant attention by scientific evidence for its beneficial health impacts besides their established nutrient value. Increasing awareness of essential milk proteins has facilitated the development of novel milk protein products that are progressively required for nutritional benefits. The need to better understand the beneficial effects of milk-protein derived peptides has, therefore, led to the development of analytical approaches for the isolation, separation and identification of bioactive peptides in complex dairy products. Continuous emphasis is on the biological function and nutritional characteristics of milk constituents using several powerful techniques, namely omics, model cell lines, gut microbiome analysis and imaging techniques. This review briefly describes the state-of-the-art approach of peptidomics and lipidomics profiling approaches for the identification and detection of milk-derived bioactive peptides while taking into account recent progress in their analysis and emphasizing the difficulty of analysis of these functional and endogenous peptides.

Recent findings suggest that mammalian amniotic fluid (AF) is a source of multipotent stem cells (SCs), which can be used in regenerative medicine and assisted reproduction. We report the isolation, culture and characterization of amniotic fluid-derived cells from pregnant water buffalo uterus. These undifferentiated AF cells expanded without feeder layer over a period of 100 days up to passages 20 and the expression of alkaline phosphatase (AP), Oct-4, Nanog and Sox-2, GAPDH and β-actin could be detected by RT-PCR. The cells exhibited uniform morphology and normal chromosome number. The up-regulation or down-regulation of transcription factors of each gene varied with passage number. We conclude that putative bubaline AF cells can be cultured and maintained in vitro for a prolonged period and offer a potential source of multipotent cells for applications including assisted reproduction in buffalo.

Food insecurity and malnutrition are prominent issues for this century. As the world's population continues to increase, ensuring that the earth has enough food that is nutritious too will be a difficult task. Today one billion people of the world are undernourished and more than a third are malnourished. Moreover, the looming threat of climate change is exasperating the situation even further. At the same time, the total acreage of arable land that could support agricultural use is already near its limits, and may even decrease over the next few years due to salination and desertification patterns resulting from climate change. Clearly, changing the way we think about crop production must take place on multiple levels. New varieties of crops must be developed which can produce higher crop yields with less water and fewer agricultural inputs. Besides this, the crops themselves must have improved nutritional qualities or become biofortified in order to reduce the chances of 'hidden hunger' resulting from malnourishment. It is difficult to envision the optimum way to increase crop production using a single uniform strategy. Instead, a variety of approaches must be employed and tailored for any particular agricultural setting. New high-impact technologies such as green biotechnology, biofortification, and nanotechnology offer opportunities for boosting agricultural productivity and enhancing food quality and nutritional value with eco-friendly manner. These agricultural technologies currently under development will renovate our world to one that can comfortably address the new directions, our planet will take as a result of climate change.

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Salinity stress has become a significant concern to global food security. Revealing the mechanisms that enable plants to survive under salinity has immense significance. Sorghum has increasingly attracted researchers interested in understanding the survival and adaptation strategies to high salinity. However, systematic analysis of the DEGs (differentially expressed genes) and their relative expression has not been reported in sorghum under salt stress. The de novo transcriptomic analysis of sorghum under different salinity levels from 60 to 120 mM NaCl was generated using Illumina HiSeq. Approximately 323.49 million high-quality reads, with an average contig length of 1145 bp, were assembled de novo. On average, 62% of unigenes were functionally annotated to known proteins. These DEGs were mainly involved in several important metabolic processes, such as carbohydrate and lipid metabolism, cell wall biogenesis, photosynthesis, and hormone signaling. SSG 59-3 alleviated the adverse effects of salinity by suppressing oxidative stress (H2O2) and stimulating enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant activities (SOD, APX, CAT, APX, POX, GR, GSH, ASC, proline, and GB), as well as protecting cell membrane integrity (MDA and electrolyte leakage). Significant up-regulation of transcripts encoding the NAC, MYB, and WRYK families, NHX transporters, the aquaporin protein family, photosynthetic genes, antioxidants, and compatible osmolyte proteins were observed. The tolerant line (SSG 59-3) engaged highly efficient machinery in response to elevated salinity, especially during the transport and influx of K+ ions, signal transduction, and osmotic homeostasis. Our data provide insights into the evolution of the NAC TFs gene family and further support the hypothesis that these genes are essential for plant responses to salinity. The findings may provide a molecular foundation for further exploring the potential functions of NAC TFs in developing salt-resistant sorghum lines.

The strength of any ongoing breeding programme thoroughly depends on the presence of genetic variation at both morphological and molecular level. In present study, total 36 pearl millet genotypes were evaluated for different morphological characters along with grain Fe and Zn contents. High estimates of coefficient of variation inclusive of high heritability and genetic advance as per cent of mean was marked for dry fodder yield per plant, grain yield per plant, Fe and Zn contents. This suggested that the selection based on these traits will be effective in improving breeding material. Further correlation analysis showed a highly significant correlation between grain Fe and Zn content which signifies simultaneous improvement in the two traits. Grain yield per plant showed non significant negative correlation with Fe and Zn thus suggesting improvement in nutrient value without sacrificing yield. A set of 64 SSRs was also used for molecular diversity assessment. A significant positive correlation was observed among number of alleles, Polymorphic Information Content (PIC) and number of repeats in the SSR motifs. Across the linkage groups, the mean PIC varied from 0.48 (LG 3) to 0.76 (LG 2). Mean alleles per locus and overall PIC obtained was 7.20 and 0.68 respectively. Presence of ample variation at morpho-genetic level signifies their use as parents in the out crossing programmes to obtain new improved hybrids with desired traits.

Genotype environment interaction and stability performance were investigated on grain yield per plot in eight environments during Rabi (here, rabi means that a crop has been grown in Rabi season: crops that are sown in winter and harvested in spring in the Indian subcontinent) 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 using 100 diverse wheat genotypes. Research was conducted at Chaudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar, Haryana in India. The analysis of variance revealed that genotype, environment and their interaction had a highly significant effect on the yield as reflected in Eberhart and Russel model and The Eberhart and Russell model indicated the suitability of the genotypes WH 1142, PBW 661, PBW 475 and DBW 17 with high mean, bi > 1 and non-significant deviation from regression to favorable environment, whereas the genotypes UP 2660 and DBW 88 with high mean, bi < 1 and non-significant deviation from regression were found suitable for poor environment. The Additive Main Effects and Multipicative Interaction (AMMI) analysis of variance for grain yield per plot across the environments showed that 26.41% of the total variation was attributed to genotypic effects, 70.22% to environmental effects and 3.37% to genotype × environment interaction effects. AMMI biplot study indicated the genotypes PBW 750, DPW 621-50, WH 542, PBW 486, PBW 661 and WH 1192 stable across the environments as they did not exert strong interactive forces; hence, they were selected as potential candidates for possible release in the study areas. Furthermore, the which-won–where model indicated the adaptation of genotypes PBW 706, PBW 769, DBW 116, WH 1157, WH 789 and WH1186 to first mega-environment and genotypes DBW 16, WH 1152, WH 1105 and PBW 503 in the second. These genotypes could be utilized in breeding programs to improve grain yield in bread wheat and may be used as stable breeding material for commercial cultivation.

Global warming has increased the temperature significantly over a large extent both spatially and temporally. The threat of heat stress during the germination and seedling establishment stages in the wheat crop is now more prevalent than ever before. The present experiment assessed the effect of elevated temperature on the germination and early seedling growth of wheat genotypes. The seeds were sown under four temperatures, viz., 20 °C, 25 °C, 30 °C and 35 °C; the germination, seedling vigor and enzyme activities in 8-day-old seedlings were assessed. The temperature significantly influenced germination and early seedling growth. The germination percentage at 20 and 25 °C was statistically on par with and higher than at 30 and 35 °C. The seedling vigor parameters were maximum at 25 °C and showed a reduction at higher temperatures. Genotypic differences were observed for early heat stress as the genotypes WH 730, WH 1123 and HD 2967 showed tolerance towards heat stress during germination, whereas the genotypes PBW 725 and WH 1105 were susceptible. Antioxidant enzyme activities in seedlings increased with the rise in temperature. Catalase, peroxidase and superoxide dismutase enzymes showed increased activities at higher temperature levels.