To protect above‐ground plant organs from excessive water loss, their surfaces are coated by waxes. The genes involved in wax formation have been investigated in detail in Arabidopsis but scarcely in crop species. Here, we aimed to isolate and characterize a CER1 enzyme responsible for formation of the very long‐chain alkanes present in high concentrations especially during late stages of wheat development. On the basis of comparative wax and transcriptome analyses of various wheat organs, we selected TaCER1‐1A as a primary candidate and demonstrated that it was located to the endoplasmic reticulum, the subcellular compartment for wax biosynthesis. A wheat nullisomic‐tetrasomic substitution line lacking TaCER1‐1A had significantly reduced amounts of C33 alkane, whereas rice plants overexpressing TaCER1‐1A showed substantial increases of C25–C33 alkanes relative to wild type control. Similarly, heterologous expression of TaCER1‐1A in Arabidopsis wild type and the cer1 mutant resulted in increased levels of unbranched alkanes, iso‐branched alkanes and alkenes. Finally, the expression of TaCER1‐1A was found activated by abiotic stresses and abscisic acid treatment, resulting in increased production of alkanes in wheat. Taken together, our results demonstrate that TaCER1‐1A plays an important role in wheat wax alkane biosynthesis and involved in responding to drought and other environmental stresses.

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The outcome of international education attracts increasing interests among scholars in the perceived employability and education-to-work transition. Yet, there is a lack of empirical studies focusing on understanding international students’ perceived employability and the strategies to improve their employability. The purpose of this study is to explore the perceived employability and its factors (e.g. demographic factors, educational factors, work-related factors, language and U.S. experience factors, and family factors) among international students in the U.S. Also, the study examines how gender moderates the relationships between perceived employability and other factors. A survey was conducted among international students at a midwestern public university in the U.S. and 138 participants’ responses were included in the data analysis. The result shows that international students are confident in their employability. Interestingly, compared to female international students, the advantages brought by being in the field of engineering or having more work experiences are mainly for males.

Immigrant mothers, who are socially constructed as an isolated group of people, are often excluded from the studies of adult learners. In adult education, few studies focus on immigrant mothers’ ways of learning, mothering, and knowing. Based on a critical ethnographical study, this article sheds lights on immigrant mothers’ learning in a foreign land. It unveils how immigrant mothers learn mothering skills and how their lifelong learning practice interacts with the ideology of mothering in contemporary neoliberal contexts. The data come from a 2-year critical ethnographic study that included 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrant mothers in a Vancouver-based immigration settlement organization in Canada. The following five types of immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practices are examined and analyzed: (a) learning parenting skills, (b) learning to find a job, (c) learning language, (d) learning to drive, and (e) learning to live a healthy lifestyle. This article argues that immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practice constitutes a mechanism, one in which the ideology of mothering and immigrant mothers’ everyday learning and mothering deeply interact to reproduce race, gender, and class relations. This article concludes that there is a need to study immigrant mothers, as adult learners, and to reexamine knowledge systems, ideologies, and people’s different ways of knowing and learning in adult education.

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