BackgroundSimple sequence repeats (SSRs) are ubiquitous in eukaryotic genomes. Chrysanthemum is one of the largest genera in the Asteraceae family. Only few Chrysanthemum expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences have been acquired to date, so the number of available EST-SSR markers is very low.Methodology/Principal FindingsIllumina paired-end sequencing technology produced over 53 million sequencing reads from C. nankingense mRNA. The subsequent de novo assembly yielded 70,895 unigenes, of which 45,789 (64.59%) unigenes showed similarity to the sequences in NCBI database. Out of 45,789 sequences, 107 have hits to the Chrysanthemum Nr protein database; 679 and 277 sequences have hits to the database of Helianthus and Lactuca species, respectively. MISA software identified a large number of putative EST-SSRs, allowing 1,788 primer pairs to be designed from the de novo transcriptome sequence and a further 363 from archival EST sequence. Among 100 primer pairs randomly chosen, 81 markers have amplicons and 20 are polymorphic for genotypes analysis in Chrysanthemum. The results showed that most (but not all) of the assays were transferable across species and that they exposed a significant amount of allelic diversity.Conclusions/SignificanceSSR markers acquired by transcriptome sequencing are potentially useful for marker-assisted breeding and genetic analysis in the genus Chrysanthemum and its related genera.

The Asteraceae family is at the forefront of the evolution due to frequent hybridization. Hybridization is associated with the induction of widespread genetic and epigenetic changes and has played an important role in the evolution of many plant taxa. We attempted the intergeneric cross Chrysanthemum morifolium × Leucanthemum paludosum. To obtain the success in cross, we have to turn to ovule rescue. DNA profiling of the amphihaploid and amphidiploid was investigated using amplified fragment length polymorphism, sequence-related amplified polymorphism, start codon targeted polymorphism, and methylation-sensitive amplification polymorphism (MSAP). Hybridization induced rapid changes at the genetic and the epigenetic levels. The genetic changes mainly involved loss of parental fragments and gaining of novel fragments, and some eliminated sequences possibly from the noncoding region of L. paludosum. The MSAP analysis indicated that the level of DNA methylation was lower in the amphiploid (∼45%) than in the parental lines (51.5–50.6%), whereas it increased after amphidiploid formation. Events associated with intergeneric genomic shock were a feature of C. morifolium × L. paludosum hybrid, given that the genetic relationship between the parental species is relatively distant. Our results provide genetic and epigenetic evidence for understanding genomic shock in wide crosses between species in Asteraceae and suggest a need to expand our current evolutionary framework to encompass a genetic/epigenetic dimension when seeking to understand wide crosses.

The objective of this study was to identify the major volatile compounds and their relative concentrations in flowers of different chrysanthemum cultivars and their wild relatives. The volatile organic components of fresh flowers were analyzed using a headspace solid-phase microextraction coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. In total, 193 volatile organic components were detected; the major scent components were monoterpenoids and oxygenated monoterpenoids, which accounted for 68.59%–99.93% of the total volatiles in all tested materials except for Chrysanthemum indicum collected from Huangshan, in which they accounted for only 37.45% of total volatiles. The major volatile compounds were camphor, α-pinene, chrysanthenone, safranal, myrcene, eucalyptol, 2,4,5,6,7,7ab-hexahydro-1H-indene, verbenone, β-phellandrene and camphene. In a hierarchical cluster analysis, 39 accessions of Chrysanthemum and its relatives formed six clusters based on their floral volatile compounds. In a principal component analysis, only spider type flowers were located closely on the score plot. The results of this study provide a basis for breeding chrysanthemum cultivars which desirable floral scents.

Great advancement in deep neural networks (DNNs) has led to state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of tasks. However, recent studies have shown that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which have brought great concerns when deploying these models to safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Different defense approaches have been proposed against adversarial attacks, including: 1) empirical defenses, which can be adaptively attacked again without providing robustness certification; and 2) certifiably robust approaches, which consist of robustness verification providing the lower bound of robust accuracy against any attacks under certain conditions and corresponding robust training approaches. In this paper, we focus on these certifiably robust approaches and provide the first work to perform large-scale systematic analysis of different robustness verification and training approaches. In particular, we 1) provide a taxonomy for the robustness verification and training approaches, as well as discuss the detailed methodologies for representative algorithms, 2) reveal the fundamental connections among these approaches, 3) discuss current research progresses, theoretical barriers, main challenges, and several promising future directions for certified defenses for DNNs, and 4) provide an open-sourced unified platform to evaluate 20+ representative verification and corresponding robust training approaches on a wide range of DNNs.

Polyploidy is common among flowering plants, including the Asteraceae, a relatively recent angiosperm group. EST-SSRs were used to characterize polymorphism among 29 Chrysanthemum and Ajania spp. accessions of various ploidy levels. Most EST-SSR loci were readily transferable between the species, 29 accessions were separated into three groups in terms of the number of fragments. It inferred that the formation from tetraploid to hexaploid and from octoploid to decaploid may be a recent event, while from the diploid to the tetraploid may be an ancient one in the Chrysanthemum lineage. EST-SSR polymorphism was found and some transcripts containing an SSR were transcribed differently in the de novo autotetraploid C. nankingense and C. lavandulifolium than in their progenitor diploid. EST-SSR could provide a potential molecular basis of adaptation during evolution, while whole genome duplication has a major effect on the mutational dynamics of EST-SSR loci, which could also affect gene regulation.