Sugar pine and western white pine are widely distributed, economically valuable, and ecologically important native tree species in North America. However, white pine blister rust (WPBR), caused by a non-native fungal pathogen, Cronartium ribicola J.C. Fisch. in Rabh., has substantially affected populations of these species. Cronartium is an obligate parasite,...
Managers of forest and plantation ecosystems are encountering growing problems involving plant pathogens and the expanding geographic ranges of these pathogens. Historically unexposed stands are exceptionally vulnerable when a non-native pathogen is introduced because these pathogens can cause devastating disease in a host population that lacks co-evolved resistance mechanisms. One...
Nutrigenomics is a branch of nutrition that seeks to elucidate the relationship between dietary components and expression of genes. Certain bioactive compounds present in the diet have the potential to modulate transcription of genes through their interactions with ligand-dependent nuclear receptors, a series of transcriptional regulators capable of sensing intracellular...
The abilities of plant biologists to characterize the genetic basis of physiological traits are limited by their abilities to obtain quantitative data representing precise details of trait variation and mainly to collect this data on a high-throughput scale at low cost. Deep learning-based methods have demonstrated unprecedented potential to automate...
Plant sexual reproduction requires a broad array of molecular mechanisms to proceed successfully. Some of these mechanisms are well-studied, but our knowledge of them as a whole is fundamentally incomplete. Pollen tube growth is a key part of this process, facilitating the delivery of the sperm cells to the female...
Semantic image segmentation is a relatively difficult task in computer vision. With the advent of deep learning, semantic image segmentation is increasingly of interest for researchers because of the excellent predictions from Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). However, CNNs have proven to struggle with obtaining global context of image due to...
Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx) is a species with high phenotypic plasticity and a broad distribution that, in the last decade, has experienced climate stress-induced mortality called Sudden Aspen Decline (SAD). In order to help mitigate the effects of SAD in the future, we need a better understanding of aspen’s...
Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is one of the most important crops in the world. It has been and continues to be one of the main sources of food for humans and animals. Although traditional wheat breeding has contributed greatly to the improvement of wheat both in productivity and biotic/abiotic stress...
A significant body of research demonstrates that phytochemical intake favorably influences hepatic metabolism via a number of different biological mechanisms. Other research has shown a positive effect of certain phytochemicals on kidney health, specifically in ameliorating symptoms of kidney disease. The current research used three separate studies that tested the...
Mutation of repetitive DNA by repeat-induced point mutation (RIP) is a process that occurs in many filamentous fungi of the Ascomycota during the sexual cycle. Concurrently, direct DNA repeats are often deleted by homologous recombination at high frequency during the sexual cycle. Thus, the processes of RIP and deletion compete...